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| My experience with DTV VOD I've been trying out the DTV VOD since early December on my HR20-700. Overall, I've been very pleased with it. So far, I've only been downloading programs that I selected, so if there is an automatic push feature I have not tried it.
Pros:
- Good selection of recent programs from History, A&E, NAT, and the rest
- Relatively easy to select programs and add them to the download queue
- HR20 can download a VOD program, record two more from SAT and play something from the hard disk all at the same time - cool
- Currently is free (hope it stays that way)
-VOD programs usually only have 1 or 2 30 second ads
Cons:
- HR20 is sluggish when trying to browse VOD selections, it takes a long time to populate a list and complete a selection
- Quality of VOD titles, especially SDTV programs, is a little pixelated and the screen area is cropped to keep the file sizes smaller
- There seems to be no way to determine what the file size of a program is before you download it
- Overall download speeds seem slow, although it is difficult to determine how fast DTV is pumping it out - I suspect they are limiting it on the head end to not anger their competitors/ISPs
I think the DTV VOD is a great feature to have. Just don't charge me more for it. | |
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| DirecTV is definitely either:
1 - rate limiting specific downloads so as not to anger broadband providers
or
2 - choked on their outbound connection from the VOD servers.
If (2) were the cause, you would expect to see different transfer rates at different times of the day - and based on most people's experiences and testing, that does not appear to be the case.
When they first enabled VOD last fall - transfer rates were significantly faster. As they opened the Beta up to more people, it got progressively slower - which would tend to point to (1) as the likely scenario.
Currently, the HD content is limited to a few movie selections that are effectively Pay Per View - and none have been anything I want to watch - so I haven't tested that at all.
It will be very interesting to watch what happens with DirecTV customers who use Comcast.....(thankfully, I am not one...) | | |
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