Busy HD Week / DirecTV iPhone App Review

The saying for March “in like a lion out like a lamb.” That saying should be reversed if you’re a fan of High Definition via satellite!

It appears that both Dish Network and DirecTV will turn up the heat to their HD customers by launching a handfull of new national HD channels this week.

Dish Network has been advertising that a bunch of Viacom channels will be coming in HD to Dish Network “by” April 1st, however it now appears these additions will happen on April 1st. The new channels Dish is slated to add on Wednesday include:

NICK HD, Comedy Central HD, MTV HD, VH1 HD, CMT HD, BET HD and SPIKE HD.

The news of this HD salvo from Dish Network has seemed to have awoken the sleeping DirecTV from its long winters nap. A known DirecTV employee posted a message online stating that there will be a bit of a “HD Festivus” this week and that it was no April fools joke.

While no channels were mentioned some crafty folks found that G4 TV has HD listings in its schedule starting on Wednesday. Part of me is wondering if DirecTV customers will also see E! HD and Style HD as well. (They are all Comcast properties.) I guess we will find out on Wednesday!

This is going to make for an exciting week for HD fans!

Dish Network in Another Dispute.

Will Dish Networks Hispanic customers wake up on April 2nd and find three of the most popular Spanish language channels gone from the lineup?

It appears this could be the case.

The channels in the dispute are Univision, TeleFutura and Galavision.

These channels are the main channels of Dish Networks “Dish Latino Package” and are also featured in Dish Networks new “DishMexico” package as well.

The question in my mind want to know if Dish really wants to abandon that market as the Latino will not sit and wait for Dish to come to a deal if the channels are dropped.

Last week Dish Network issued a statement to its retailers which read as follows:

“Univision/Galavision/Telefutura

During these challenging economic times, it is important that DISH Network fights hard to keep our customer’s prices low. We continuously focus on having the lowest all digital price every day for our customers.

DISH Network and Univision are currently in contract negotiations for the future carriage of Univision programming (including Univision local and national feeds, Telefutura local and national feeds as well as Galavision). Univision is demanding contract terms that DISH Network believes are too expensive and which we are unwilling to pass along to our customers. DISH understands that Univision’s programming is important to some of our customers, but we have to make sure we secure a fair and reasonable deal that will help us control our prices in the long run. We are working diligently to enter into an agreement with them and will keep you informed as negotiations continue.

Thank you,

DISH Network”

We will be keeping our eyes on this one.

DirecTV Releases iPhone Application

The folks at DirecTV are today proud parents of a new iPhone application. This DirecTV iPhone application was born to the world shortly after Midnight at the Apple iTunes Store

This new application lets iPhone owners set timers on their DirecTV DVR’s at home. The functionality closely matches the DirecTV mobile website (http://m.directv.com) but the iPhone application is much friendlier to use and is more graphical.

As someone how has beta tested both the DirecTV iPhone app and the Dish Network iPhone enhanced scheduler site the DirecTV software has some plusses and minuses.

The main advantage that DirecTV’s iPhone application has over Dish Networks beta is that your DVR does not need to be networked to be programmed remotely. The timers are set over the satellite data stream. For the Dish Network online scheduler to work your receiver needs to be connected to the Internet.

However that is also the biggest downfall of the new application as well. The fact that the DirecTV scheduler can only talk to the receiver is one of the downfalls of this program when compared to the Dish Network remote scheduler beta.

What I mean by this is that you can set 50 timers on different channels all for the same time, and you will be told that you have successfully set the timer on your DVR. Because the scheduler does not know what timers you have set on your DVR it does not tell you things such as schedule conflicts. And this can be a big problem if your away and someone else in your house has already set timers you might not know about, you might think your timers you set via the iPhone app (or DirecTV website) are going to record, but you won’t honestly know if they do until you get home.

But I also know that Rome was not built in a day and this is only the first version of the iPhone application. I would expect in the future you will be able to take advantage of your networked DVR’s. This will be a big move forward.

Another thing the Dish remote scheduler site has over DirecTV’s and that is the ability to use your iPhone as a remote control to control your receiver. For me this has come in handy a few times when I could find where the kids hid the remote. Again this is something that can be done if DirecTV decides to update thing to support Networked DVR’s.

Now I also think that a lot of folks expected to see that you could watch shows (and live TV) on your iPhone with this application. No it does not do that, however with the DirecTV2PC beta it shows that you can indeed watch your DirecTV DVR content on a remote device (so far just a PC connected to your local network) however with a few changes it should be very easy to make this content available to customers on their iPhone.

As I said before Rome was not built in a day and I give the new DirecTV iPhone application a thumbs up. I find myself using it a lot because its an icon on my phone and while I have equal access to Dish Networks beta website it is not as easy as clicking on an icon on your iPhone.

The DirecTV iPhone application takes the already easy to use remote scheduling of DirecTV.COM and makes it even friendlier on the iPhone.

I feel that this application is just the start of something big. Great job by the DirecTV Team!

You can grab a FREE copy of the DirecTV iPhone application by visiting http://tinyurl.com/satguys1