DirecTV announces plans for new local stations
By Matt Burns 
posted May 3rd 2006 8:54AM
posted May 3rd 2006 8:54AM
DirecTV
is planning to roll out a bunch of new local HD markets by years end. They have been a bit quite about what markets
they will be till now. DirecTV is saying that
after these markets are up and running they will be able to provide 65% of American households with local HD coverage.
DirecTVs customers of course need to have the newer H20 receiver and a five LMB dish.Click on for the complete list of new cities.
Complete list of new local HD stations
- Cincinnati
- Austin, Texas
- Albuquerque, NM
- Grand Rapids, MI
- Green Bay, Wis
- Greensboro, N.C.
- Las Vegas
- Madison, Wis
- Mephis, Tenn
- Portland, Maine and Ore.
- Providence, R. I.
- Reno, Nev.
- San Antonio
Great! DirecTV will have 1500 local HD Channels available by the end of 2007. Let's see I get around 6 or 7 of those(currently free with my antenna). Way to go DirecTV. Where are the national HD channels? Why is DirecTV so obsessed with local HD? I want more national HD channels. What gives?
I think that DirecTV is adding HD locals to the satellites to get more people to move their older receivers to MPEG-4 ones, thus freeing up space by eliminating all older MPEG-2 channels. This would make it able for them to give us hundreds of new HD channels, NGC-HD, MHD, etc.
w00t! Reno, bout time!
I just hope DirecTV will upgrade my H10-250 and my dish - either free or cheap!
DirecTV has agreed to extend their current agreement with TiVo for another three years, ensuring that the existing 2.8 million subscribers who use the popular DVR solution with DirecTV will be able to continue using their TiVo branded devices. I don’t know if this move indicates that DirecTV’s in-house NDS DVR solution wasn’t met with the favorable response they wanted or that they just need more time to perfect it. Either way this is good news for current DirecTV/TiVo subscribers as well as TiVo, who is in the middle of won a lawsuit against Dish Network for patent infringement....
"By June of this year, DIRECTV will have activated local HD programming in 16 more previously announced markets for a total of 36 markets, representing 58 percent of U.S. TV households."
Apparently they are not gong by the top 36 markets, because Greenville, SC is number 35 and it's not on the list. D'oh!