Dish always had at least two streams because you could record and watch at the same time.
Never forget that with Dish you can have as many streams as you want because "everything" is being sent to you all the time... it's your boxes ability to receive that limits what you get.
You want more streams you add more boxes.
Not so with Uverse because everything they send you has to fit the limited bandwidth of the weakest part of the cable which is currently the old copper they are trying to reuse.
Dish is not perfect and each form of tech used for Pay TV has it's limitations but as I said before.... you put up another bird and "everyone" in the entire contry gets more channels or better quality.
You want more streams or better quality for a wire based system and you need to rewire "everyone"
A wired system has lower costs "initially" because they can roll-out upgrades bit by bit.... with a Sat based distribution system they have to launch a new Sat which costs hundreds of millions of dollars.
So right now (for example) Dish (and DTV) has hundreds of streams coming into your home but how many you can get depends on the number of boxes you have.
With Dish and a 622/722 box you get three streams incoming (4 if you count OTA) and you can view 1 HD and 1 downconverted SD stream at the same time. All recordings are done in whatever the source is so in the extreme you can at the same time....
1. Watch 1 channel of recorded HD
2. Record 1 channel of HD
3. Record 1 channel of HD
4. Record 1 channel of HD OTA
So that's a potential of 4 streams of HD all at the same time with 1 box. Add another box and you can do 8
Now to be fair each 622/722 can only view 1 "real" channel of HD at a time (2nd will be downconverted HD to SD) but in the current setup for Uverse you can either watch a channel of HD or record a channel of HD and not both.
This sucks!
Dish has it's own issues so they are not perfect but it certainly seems like with Uverse you have to compromise on "everything" - Phone, TV, Internet
They do everything "average" at best but nothing well.
Cable/Dish/DTV have better HD
POTS is still better for phone
DSL/Cable is still better for Internet
So if you want the best you still have to use multiple sources. It's nice to have everything from one source but the "true" end-all be-all is FIOS - fiber all the way and this Uverse compromise really stinks because in trying to do too much it ends up doing nothing really well.
They simple do not have a large enough pipe to do everything at once... they knew this yet they roll out this half-a-sed "poor mans" version of FIOS and expect us to jump for joy
-JB
