Video on Demand on DirecTV

[TheMoose]

Let me start by saying I've not been a fan of downloading my movies, I prefer a disc in my player than bits & bytes on my hard drive, however,
I'm beta testing the new Video on demand (VOD) service from DirecTV & am pleasantly surprised.
I thought it would take all day to download a HD movie on my 1.5MBPS DSL line & that while it was downloading it would make the internet on my computer so slow that it would be unusable.
Well I was wrong on both counts, I have my DirecTV HR20-700 hooked up through an Ethernet cable & I downloaded a hour and a half SD movie last night in about 3 hours & a 30 min HD show in about 2 hours, not blazing fast but not bad on my DSL.
I was surprised that it didn't have any noticeable affect on the speed of the internet on my computer.

The quality of the SD was good & the quality of the HD was very good, it may not be as compressed as the HD delivered by satellite.
It also doesn't interfere with the recording on my DVR, I can record 2 shows while downloading a movie.
I can also put several shows in a Queue so I can download 4 shows at night after I've gone to bed & they'll be ready to watch in the morning.

I still prefer my HD movies on a Blu-Ray disc but this VOD has possibilities.
I'm sure there will be some content I will want to download, Shows on the TNT VOD channel for example will look much better than the HD lite feed they have now, it just depends on the pricing on how much of it I will do.

[kennyt]

I can't wait until we can download them in real time in 1080p w/uncompressed MC audio....

[TheMoose]

Originally Posted by kennyt

I can't wait until we can download them in real time in 1080p w/uncompressed MC audio....

I don't see that anytime soon for me, I'm kinda out in the country & we only got DSL 2 years ago.

[kennyt]

Yeah, I'm in an area that's riddled with fiber optics (excdept my area!) and it still isn't yet here, but one day in our life times, well likely the next ten years it will be common which is why I wonder if the HD DVD vs. Blu-ray format war really matters at all sometimes!