XStreamHD satellite delivery system successfully tested, next stop CES

XStreamHD didn't quite make its planned October 2008 launch, but movies, music and games beamed down via satellite in high bitrate 1080p with lossless audio is a bit more real, now that the company has actually tested its vaunted delivery system. Other than confirming its FSS (Fixed Satellite Service) capability from the AMC-16 satellite, there aren't many details available other than where to go for a demo at CES 2009, we just hope they can keep things running long enough for us to get a look (announcing a content partner or two probably wouldn't hurt either.)

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 17th 2008 7:59PM]

movies, music and games beamed down via satellite in high bitrate 1080p with lossless audio.............dude...sign me [the f**k] up.......

are they going to offer actual channels / networks or is it strictly movies, music and games on demand?

is the equipment free, leased or straight purchase?

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 17th 2008 8:37PM]

Yeah, they need to partner with Dishnetwork on this or something. I need a few channels (USA HD, Spike HD, HDNet, Versus HD, and ESPN2 HD)

[twister Posted Dec 18th 2008 12:58AM]

If it is something you can't buy or own, I'm not in. I don't buy on demand, I but blu-ray discs so I can play them when I feel like it. If you could download these to own in high def 1080p and lossless audio, I would then be intrigued. The thing that still stops me is that all storage drives eventually fail, blu-ray discs will not. I use Dish Network's external hard drive feature and have 3 750gb drives full of hd movies, and a few months ago, one of them (Seagate) failed and content can not be retreived. So that has put me off of buying anything in digital (download) form.

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 18th 2008 3:02AM]

If you lost the movies and you actually downloaded them legally, you can re-download them. I'm going to assume that you ripped some movies illegally from Blockbuster or downloaded them.

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 18th 2008 10:30AM]

I would imagine that he didn't download anything, he DVR'd them.

Losing the contents of my EHD for my Dish DVR is also something that bothers me. I'm looking into a backup strategy at some point, the disks are basic GNU/Linux ext3 formatted volumes, so in theory it's at least possible to copy the movies to a back-up location but it's not clear to me that copying them to another EHD will "just work". I'll have to play with it.

At this point I'm interested to know if XStreamHD will work as an on-demand PPV service, or use a subscription model.