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.

Comments

Voom

[woah]

More info about voom here.

Most will migrate eventually to DirecTV.

[MtViewGuy]

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.).

PVR didn't kill it

[Xeo 024]

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."

Re:Voom went down because they had no customers

[TGK]

Not sure what you mean by homemade, but I can give you an explanation of how they arived at that number.

Lots of Vooms channels were "upconverted." IE, they weren't natively filmed in HD, they were filmed in SD and had the extra lines added by some hardware before broadcast.

Of course, those of us that have groaned in dismay when CSI enhances four pixils into a 1024x758 high res image of a distinctive and case busting tatoo, can easily attest to the reality that you can't create content where none existed.

Vooms content was HD in format only. It's clear and evident when you look at the final product what's native HD and what's an upconverted mockery.

Anyone paying through the nose for Vooms services should be savy enough to tell the difference and demand the real thing.

Signal Loss

[mecro]

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?

Re:Signal Loss

[Xeo 024]

Check out this thread.

It appears that they did have signal problems in the West Coast, but they were trying to get another satellite up to help fix that problem:

"Those slots might be used to expand Voom's limited transmission capacity, to create a backup for the single satellite it launched last year off the East Coast of the United States and to improve its ability to reach the West Coast."

"Cablevision Systems Corp. Wednesday won the bidding for two orbital slots that could help fill a gap in its Voom nationwide satellite TV service.

The two orbital positions would allow satellites to reach mainly the West Coast.

Since Voom launched service in October, its single satellite, whose orbital position is off the East Coast, has been weakest in transmitting TV channels to the West Coast, especially the Seattle and Portland areas."

Re:Mpeg4?

[tivoKlr]

There was a discussion recently on /. about the transition to mpeg4, mostly about how it would screw the hdtivo owners.

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...

Re:Not sold?

[Bobzibub]

b/c they believe they can purchase the "birds" at lower costs from creditors looking to get some of their money back.
-b

Re:Zoom sucked to start with

[Golias]

I am a professional satellite installer.

You install satellites?

You must be very tall.

Good Riddance.

[Lordfly]

I work at a retail store that sells Dish and Voom... Voom was the laughingstock of the store the second it came in.

It had the feel of a "fly by night" organization... the contractors who came to install it for us hadn't heard of it... the tech support number we had for them was disconnected... their HD Box, which originally sold for 800 dollars (!!) plus installation fees plus 40 bucks a month minimum, was prone to crashing. Their satellite dish locked us out of everything except "demo" mode, which meant we could showcase the exact same stupid animation show every half hour.

Every time we had a customer ask about Voom, we steered them towards Dish. A shame, too, since we got paid more for Voom than for Dish... but we couldn't in our good conscience sell that piece of crap.

Did I mention the HD channels they offered were rotten? A Fashion Show channel (high def anorexia), a Moov channel (a Winamp vis set to music), a couple of black-and-white B movie channels, a few more shitty movie channels, high definition weather (wtf?), and so on. What a waste of bandwidth.

I laughed when I heard they only had 20,000 customers after a year.

Good bye, Voom.

Re:Good Riddance.

[rossjudson]

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.