As I hinted at in the HDTV thread, I was considering Voom. And on Feburary 15th, the installer came. For those that don't know, Voom is a satellite service geared towards HDTV owners, with 21 original channels, and 18 HDTV channels from places like HBO, ESPN and Discovery. The rest of the lineup is the traditional channels nearly any pay TV service includes like USA, SciFi, TNT and such.

The install consisted of an off air antenna and dish aimed southeast. The off air antenna the installer chose is a square directional unit. His reason for doing so is due to every TV antenna for the area all being on top of Cheyene Mountain, so no need for a bigger winged one to get the best signal. Thanks to the in house wiring, the installer didn't have to route cabling all over the outside of the house to the living room.

The box they use looks like this on the front and this on the back. (Thanks to images.google.com for these). The installer powered the box on, got a great signal on the dish, and proceeded to tell the box what off air channels existed. Signals on all four looked good. Sadly, NBC here still doesn't broadcast in HD, and no local UPN or WB channel exists. But ABC, CBS, FOX, and PBS come in fine. Once everything looked good, he started the box on a firmware download, gave me a quick explanation of the remote, and left.

The remote is nothing fancy, but does make use of 4 colored buttons for context sensitive functions. It is a universal remote to control a TV and VCR, but nothing else. Not really much to talk about here.

To use the system, it has a "Voom" button that brings you to the main menu. It is basically a category view selection for the guide. The nice thing is that it is live, so selecting All HD shows my local channels a lot during primetime, but they are hidden during the day when they typically just air standard content. The downside to the menu and guide is that it doesn't hide unsubscribed channels. An update soon is supposed to add this. The receiver seems stable, as it has remained powered on since I got it due to using the ReplayTV for PVR functions. The size is quite large for a basic receiver, but at CES they showed a newer smaller unit, and a PVR unit inside the same size box I have.

Ok, now for a rundown of the service. The Voom specific HD channels offer a wide selection of older movies. If I want to watch a Kung Fu movie, I go to the Kung Fu channel. Every movie I have seen so far has been upsized to HD very well. The picture quality I would have to say is better then DVDs upsized to HD via an ATI All in Wonder card. Beyond the movie channels, they offer a 24 hour news channel, world sports, discovery like channel that shows places around the world, extreme sports/activities channel, concert channel, fashion channel, auction channel, art gallery channel, kids animation channel, and lastly, a music channel that displays HD visuals.

So far, out of the Voom exclusive channels, I have watched the news a bit and do like the fact that they take advantage of HD for weather and such. Instead of showing parts of the US, they can show the entire US with every county clearly visible. News wise, they need to partner with another news source, as their stories rarely cover everything. the concert channel has been interesting for a few shows. The discovery clone is very similar to DiscoveryHD, and I find myself putting on either one if I want an HD channel on. Once a PVR comes out, I'll probably record some of the other shows, since I usually don't watch a ton of live tv.

Now, the big advantage I have noticed on the service so far is the improved picture quality. I notice much less compression artifacts, and the box seems to do a much better job of upsizing the content then my TV does when it was being fed by the old Dish receiver.


Of course, I went into this knowing there would be the possibility of the service going down. Thankfully, install was only $1 with a six month commitment to $50 of programming. http://www.voom.com/ says "Voom has ceased taking new customer orders and will shut down by the end of March." But oddly, http://voomllc.com/ is up with a new phone number, and online ads are now going to that site. The customer service reps are being told Cablevision still owns voom.com and posted the message, while Voom HD LLC (the new company started by Charles Dolan) registered the new domain. They also went ahead with a service upgrade that changed over the encoders to be MPEG-4 ready. So it is really confusing right now to know how long the service will last. But at CES, March was supposed to be the month of added HD and SD channels, and the PVR, and so far the first part of that seems to be on schedule.

I'll hopefully update this review with some more information about the future PVR and new channels. Thus far, what they have shown of the PVRs is nice. It has two off the air tuners and two dish tuners, all capable of being fed into the box via one cable. And it networks to any of the standard receivers via ethernet or coax. You can tune to any live channel, or watch any recorded program on any unit in the house, even if the auxiliary units aren't cabled to the dish directly.