The Show That Went to the Dogs

Last night many folks may have thought that the dog show was at Madison Square Garden in New York, however last nights true dog show was the Dish Network Tech Chat with Mark Jackson and Dan Minnick.
 

The show is meant to tell Dish Network customers about exciting new features coming soon to their Dish Network receivers, yet last nights show was just a big advertisement for Echostar products, products that most Dish Network customers will never use nor need.

They started the show tooting their own horn (rightfully so) for all the awards they won at this years CES and showed us a video on the big award winner, the TR-50.  The TR-50 is a DVR which can pickup over the air digital broadcasts and record them on its internal hard drive.

For close to 30 minutes the Echostar guys told us all about the big ATSC conversion, which is going to happen in 2009.  They went on to tell us how to order coupons for ATSC converter and then when all was said and done they said that Dish Network customers really don’t need to worry about the ATSC conversion, and told people to hold off ordering DTV coupons from the government as their TR-40 converter was delayed and would not be out until May and all coupons shipped out will be expired by the time Echostar gets their boxes on the street.  

I was disappointed at how much time they wasted on this subject to tell us in the end that we didn’t need to worry about any of this stuff as we subscribe to Dish Network.

The rest of the show was no better, the questions that they took from emails were soft ball questions and the phone call questions they took too seemed scripted.

One caller stumped Mark Jackson who is the president of Echostar Technologies Corp with one question, the question was on the TR-50 and the caller asked if the TR-50 could output video in HD since it has HDMI and component outputs.  Jackson turned red and said he didn’t know the answer. (BTW the answer is yes it does output HD)

Ultimately the chat left a bad taste in my mouth, there was really no news of interest at all to Dish Network customers, and instead this chat was like a big ad for Echostar products.  Now that Echostar and Dish Network are two separate companies lets hope they they don’t use these chats which are meant to inform Dish Network customer about new things from Dish Network just to advertise Echostar products.

I ran an online chat last night and close to 200 people showed up and most walked away with the bad taste in their mouth that I had. Dish Network had 60 minutes to tell it’s customers what the future holds and instead they elected to give us an hour long ad for Echostar products.  It was a truly disappointing.

I feel bad for those “Satellite Dish” readers who tuned in because I mentioned this show in my Friday update.  I feel bad because that’s an hour of your life you will never get back.

While Dish Network has had their share of bad shows, this is one Dish Network Chat that truly went to the dogs.