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CEDIA 2008: Satellite's Subdued Week At CEDIA
The CEDIA Expo has never been a particularly big show for the satellite industry players. But this week's event in Denver did provide a few tidbits of news worth mentioning.
In the video space, both DIRECTV and DISH Network were on hand on the Expo floor, showing off their respective set-top options and educating installers on their latest and greatest feature offerings. DISH was probably the most involved this year given the recent launch of its 1080p Turbo HD service, which Marcel Guajardo, one of the company's product marketing pros, said is proving to be a big hit with consumers.
"It's definitely taking off with the high end, cost-is-no-object kind of buyers," he said. "But we're also seeing more of the average users in there too. People are realizing that, for just a little more money they can have a big jump in performance."
In addition to the Turbo HD pep rally, DISH took advantage of the CEDIA spotlight to launch two new set-top DVRs - the ViP722 and the ViP722k - both of which offer 350 hours of SD storage and 55 hours of HD (the 722k includes an optional OTA tuner).
The CEDIA Expo also turned out to be the unofficial coming out party for Sirius XM, though very little seemed to have changed between the two companies as of Expo time. The Sirius logo was still all over the Sirius booth, for example, and the company was still plugging away with its standard array of installed home systems products. XM, for its part, was nowhere to be found. One Sirius rep said that things are moving along, though it is still early in the process.
"In the home channel, XM has a lot of the same partners and we (Sirius) have a lot of the same partners," she said, "so we're still just trying to bring that all together."
The CEDIA Expo has never been a particularly big show for the satellite industry players. But this week's event in Denver did provide a few tidbits of news worth mentioning.
In the video space, both DIRECTV and DISH Network were on hand on the Expo floor, showing off their respective set-top options and educating installers on their latest and greatest feature offerings. DISH was probably the most involved this year given the recent launch of its 1080p Turbo HD service, which Marcel Guajardo, one of the company's product marketing pros, said is proving to be a big hit with consumers.
"It's definitely taking off with the high end, cost-is-no-object kind of buyers," he said. "But we're also seeing more of the average users in there too. People are realizing that, for just a little more money they can have a big jump in performance."
In addition to the Turbo HD pep rally, DISH took advantage of the CEDIA spotlight to launch two new set-top DVRs - the ViP722 and the ViP722k - both of which offer 350 hours of SD storage and 55 hours of HD (the 722k includes an optional OTA tuner).
The CEDIA Expo also turned out to be the unofficial coming out party for Sirius XM, though very little seemed to have changed between the two companies as of Expo time. The Sirius logo was still all over the Sirius booth, for example, and the company was still plugging away with its standard array of installed home systems products. XM, for its part, was nowhere to be found. One Sirius rep said that things are moving along, though it is still early in the process.
"In the home channel, XM has a lot of the same partners and we (Sirius) have a lot of the same partners," she said, "so we're still just trying to bring that all together."
