Dish Is A Few Channels Short

Over the last several months, it's been quite clear that the current trend in television is to offer more and more HD. Users demand it, and they'll switch providers for it. After all, what's the point of that expensive flat screen HDTV if it only magnifies the poor signal?

Satellite offers a third pathway to the home after cable, and as cable calls it "phone company TV" which is Fios or Uverse. Among the satellite guys, the choices are DirecTV and Dish. Quality aside, DirecTV clearly has the most HD channels, and claims 95 currently. Meanwhile, Dish realizes that they missed the boat on this one, and is playing catch up now.

So what do those deceptive Dish folks do? They quote that they have 95 channels too! The secret is that while they had those channels for few hours, they then took away 15 of them by the end of the day. They ended up bailing on their agreement with the Voom channels (more in next week's Nudgecast about them), so the 95 channels was never quite seen by anyone.

I don't even have Dish, and I'm still annoyed by this. Don't the folks at Dish think their subscribers can count that high? Anyway, I will say that 80 channels of HD is pretty good these days, as Optimum only provides 40 with their iO Digital package (even counting CNN HD and a few other duds), and even with the top of the line Optimum Gold package, it's still only 45. When I compared last month, overall Fios had even less.

Jonas