After watching Arrested Development and House this week, I noticed an odd message at the beginning of each episode. They both said something like "HDTV brought to you by DirecTV." What does this mean? That's the only thing on my HDTivo that isn't brought to me by DirecTV. I am eagerly awaiting the day that we can get local HD channels over DirecTV (there are several we can't get due to trees). Do you think that's what is going on with this? Is it a push towards that?

On a related note, I keep seeing that DirecTV commercial, the one with the people flying satellite kites. There's a narrator saying that DirecTV will be launching 1,500 HD channels across the nation. 1,500? How is that? Local channels, I assume, but I'm quite curious.

Uh, I would guess that "brought to you by" is just in the conventional "sponsored by" sense... DirecTV obvoiusly wants to have their name associated with HDTV, so sponsoring Fox's HDTV broadcasts is certainly productive. I wouldn't read too much into it, I mean, of course DirecTV is working on getting everyone's local channels to them in HD, but I don't think this is a sign that it's going to come anytime soon. DirecTV's commitment, as mentioned in their press release after the Super Bowl, is 1500 channels by 2007, which could mean 12/31/2007.

So, uh, don't hold your breath.

Less satellites? I read (on Gizmodo, I believe) that they're launching 4 new ones, two of them next year.

Less satellites compared to how many it would take to serve 1,500 HD channels with the current MPEG format.

Gotcha.

MPEG4 will start showing up this summer in new Sky+ (?) boxes by DirecTV. You are correct that MPEG4 content is still a ways away, but at least the hardware will be out soon.