Ask Slashdot: The Dish

Figured I'd step on Cliff's toes and ask my own question. I live in an area with poor cable service and have pretty much accepted that if I want the Sci Fi channel and all the other cool channels, I'm going to need to get a Dish. Net access would be nice, but its not going to be a deciding factor. Ideally I wouldn't need cable- I don't care about local channels but I need the networks too (FOX for the X-Files and Futurama especially). So here it comes: Which Dish? I see many networks with many features, but which one is best? I want lots of channels, but I'm not rich. But I'd like my surround system to sound really good (course first I probably better get a center channel and some good rear speakers *grin*).

Comments

Dish TV from Echostar of course

[Jim Buzbee]

I'm a bit biased (I now work for Echostar) but I signed up for Dish TV long before I started work here. The programming options seemed to be better. With Direct TV you had to select from two different companies for channels and they only came in "packages". So if you wanted channel "A" and channel "B" you might have to order one channel package from USSB and another channel package from the other company (I forget the name).

But the best reason to support Echostar and Dish TV is why I signed on. We are starting a project to put Linux on our set-top boxes. We already have a Web TV/Windows CE box, but we obviously don't want to rely only on Microsoft.

So I throw a question back at the Slashdot readers, What would you want to see in a Linux based set-top satellite receiver ? We are considering a Web TV type of operation with a local cache fed via our very fat satellite pipe. Home-networking is another option. We will have a browser on the box of course (Mozilla?). Anyone have any thoughts on how to utilize a very fat pipe comming in, but a thin pipe going out ? We haven't yet decided on a CPU. Anyone have any thoughts on that ? This is going to be a very cool project and I'm looking forward to getting it on-line !