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Voom No More
RokaMoka writes "Today the world got a little fuzzier. Voom has announced thay they are shutting down. As a subscriber I can tell you they will be sorely missed, as they far better than the competition.
For those of you who are not familiar with voom, they had 3 times as many HiDef channels as the next competitor and a really nice remote control. It sure was pretty while it lasted." I think they died because they don't have a PVR. Hi-Def folks are early adopters and they want the technology. Of course, with all the mess swirling around DirecTV's move to Mpeg4 and the obsolesence of the HD-Tivo, it will be interesting to see what happens next.
More info about voom here.
And shit content, there isn't 3x more HD channels than the next provider, they had a bunch of homemade channels and they just aren't big enough to carry that. They'd need 10s of millions of subscribers to pay for all of that.
About $50 for about 20 HD channels and plenty of others is pretty damn good. I'll miss you voom.
this is strange. they even sent out a notice a few
weeks ago explicilty stating they would be continuing service and announced some new offers...
The reason is simple: DirecTV has already publicly announced that they will launch more satellites to provide more 720p/1080i high-definition channels from both cable channel provider and local broadcast sources.
In short, by the end of 2007 your DirecTV receiver dish will get most (if not all) your local channels broadcasting in high-definition along with high-definition signals from the cable channel providers (ESPN/ESPN2 HD, Discovery HD Theater, HDNet, HBO and Showtime in HD, etc.).
Article
It didn't die because it didn't have PVR. It's death could partly be blamed for the internal family conflict between the Dolans.
"Earlier this year Chuck Dolan lost a boardroom battle with his son, CEO Jimmy Dolan, that resulted in the company cutting off funding for Voom. "
and
"In 2004 Voom lost $661.4 million on paltry revenues of $14.9 million, including $354.9 million in write-downs."
I've read numerous reports that VOOM had terrible problems trying to connect people on the west coast, as their satellite supposedly is hovering over the east coast. This meant that their satellite service was more suseptible to rain fade and the like. Anyone have anymore info?
Basically, when the spaceway sats go up, there will be a transition to mpeg4 and an elimination of mpeg2 saving bandwidth, allowing for more hd channels and tons of hd locals, etc.
Hopefully there will be a reasonably priced hd pvr offered too...
Ocean is land, covered with water.
I am a professional satellite installer. I work for a small independent company in Washington state. We install both Dish and DTV. We looked at Zoom to see if we wanted to install it as well. It is true that all of there channels were broadcast in 1080i or 720p but most of these channels source material was not HD. Anyone who has ESPN in HD knows what I mean, just about the only time you actually get HD is Sports Center. Also there only satellite being way on the east cost made it next to impossible to get it on the west coast, line of sight was only about 8 degrees off horizon. I have Dish myself but I cant wait for DTVs mpeg4 system to come online.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Our installer said it wasn't required except for Pay Per View.
Just like every other cable or satellite has been for a decade... where have you been.
Regarding modulation, the most recent demodulator chipsets for 8-VSB now perform just as well as COFDM receive chipsets. They can handle multiple ghosts, pre-ghosts, etc.
But only a small percentage of Americans depend on over-the-air transmission of any kind, most are on cable or satellite, so I don't think you can blame the current state of US HDTV on 8-VSB. I'm not sure HD has caught on anywhere on the planet, including COFDM modulation countries!
HD's problem has been one of inertia and technological mismatch. People have to spend a lot of money to get into HDTV, and while it looks cool, most people haven't been drawn to it (unlike, say, an iPod, which it seems like everyone NEEDS to have, and can be picked up for a few hundred dollars).
The tech mismatch is that over-the-air reception generally needs another box, cable and DBS systems receive HD differently as well. The technical end of getting HD into your set is beyond most people's "technological knowledge or care level".
Moreover, HD content has lagged because of the market lag...chicken and egg.
On the other hand, HD sets are now finally starting to really sell. Look out for the DirectTV offerings on their Ka-band spot-beam satellites. They'll have a lot of virgin bandwidth for HD. Voom got out there about one year too early for the HD set market.
Gee thanks, moron sales guy. Good thing people like you were pounding the nails into the coffin; now we can all go back to watching shitty cable and shitty satellite quality. I hope you enjoy pushing turd products, 'cause that's where your career is headed.
I dumped DirecTV and got Voom based on picture quality. Voom has the best technology right now, period. Their price point is also pretty damn good.
Voom's own HD programming was not all that interesting, with the exceptions of the travel channel and the Rave music channel, both of which were excellent. Where Voom was/is the best is delivery of all the other stuff.
For each of HBO, Showtime, Starz, Max, etc...the full HD feeds for both coasts are available. Every channel that had an HD version is carried -- ESPN HD, Discovery, TNTHD, etc...That's a lot of good HD content, and you pretty much don't want to go back to watching the conventional crap afterwards. DirecTV's crap-ass HD offering: ONE HBO HD channel, ONE Showtime HD channel, ESPNHD, Discovery HD. Oh, and please pay an extra $11 for that. Wahoo. Yeah, we're all MUCH better off without Voom.
One thing that isn't mentioned very often is that Voom's SD channels are of _substantially_ higher quality than other satellite systems. SciFi, a channel that needs HD more than anybody else, is quite watchable in SD on Voom. Not so on DirecTV, where it looks like a bag of colored lego with rainbow blocking MPEG distortion so painful that if you threw up on the screen watching it, you probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the puke and the image. (Once upon a time DirecTV's PQ was actually decent. Those days are long gone, and they're the reason I switched to Voom).
What I still can't figure out is exactly why Voom failed in the market, given that the product was dramatically superior to everything else out there, in cost and performance. Talk about a marketing failure!
I guess when Voom started out it was really pricy and unreliable. By the time I got my Voom box, the service was reliable, the price was WAY cheaper than anything else, and I've been completely satisfied from day one (with the except of an HD DVR -- I still use a plain old SD Tivo for that, and it works fine with Voom).
Well, fuck it. Summer's here anyway, and my spiffy Samsung DLP will just stay dark more often. I'll probably get skin cancer, and it'll be James Dolan's fault.