Everybody here probably knows the debate. If you want to get digital TV signals today, and you've got your HDTV-ready set, it still sucks to be you.

You can buy DirecTV with TiVo or UltimateTV. This gives you all the great time shifting features you could ever want. But, you don't get component output, and you don't get hi-def signals. (Let's ignore the ReplayTV 4000 for now, since it doesn't have digital input from the sateliltes -- a deal-killing bug for me. I want to minimize the number of digital->analog->digital roundtrips taken by my TV signal.)

You can buy a (much more expensive) HDTV decoder. This gives you beautiful signals. But, you can't time shift (or, you have to spend even more insane amounts of money on a digital VHS deck that may or may not be instantly obsolete).



My solution has been to stick my head in the sand and suck it up with my VCR an analog cable TV. I get decent-enough quality with my progressive scan DVD player. But, now I feel like I've been forced to make a decision because I want to watch Jeremiah, the new show written by JMS. It's only on Showtime. Getting Showtime from my analog cable vendor would require me to upgrade to their (lame) digital service which costs more money and gives arguably lower quality signals than their analog service (yes, it's really that ugly). The show starts March 3. This eliminates the Moxi / Dish combination from consideration, for the moment, because it's not for sale yet.

My current temptation is to spend $200 with AmericanSatellite, getting myself the Phillips/DIrecTiVo unit plus the elliptical dish suitable for future hi-def signals.

So, is this really the best compromise given today's shambling mess of digital television? My hope is that, in a year or two, I'll ditch the cheap TiVo box to replace it with some sort of bigger-better-faster-stronger hi-def DirecTiVo (or ReplayTV or Moxi or whatever equivalent).

Other random questions:

Is the elliptical dish for DirecTV the same hardware as the one used for Dish? Could I switch later?

Does the DishPVR suck? Dish would cost a good bit less money than DirecTV, but you get this box that's destined to be orphaned in favor of the future Moxi box.