totally agree!!! I have dish HD and am thinking of switching but if Tata Sky is also not that great, what are the other options??? anyone has any experience with ICC HD service? They are giving the HD box free and even though they might not have that many HD channels now, they do support 5.1 audio. any ideas guys???
All DTH operators are a compromise currently. Dish HD and TS+HD seems to be a better compromise. Personally, Dish HD gives less compromise as they have max capacity and do not do pathetic thing like DRC to audio and video which TS do. So you are better off watching Discovery and Nat Geo HD in Stereo on Dish HD (you could convert to pseudo 5.1 anyway through your AVR) than TS HD setup which completely spoil these channels through extra video compression and DRC on Audio despite it being 5.1. They were doing this to 2 HD channels before, now they are doing to Star Cricket HD as well. All SD channels are also affected.
Add to it MONO sound on 9 of the PRIME SD channels like HBO, PIX, Zee TV, T&L, Animal Planet, etc! Can you imagine? Despite them giving mono audio on these channels they have the guts to tell me its stereo! This much pathetic such DTH operators can be. If they are REALLY unaware of such issues, think of the kind of folks managing their setup! They had screwed Video as well on Star Cricket HD and took about a week to fix a SINGLE setting they messed with which should have had done immediately out of sheer embarrassment. But as usual, they shamelessly SLEPT on this issue for about a week. So, while I am keeping it primarily for Star HD channels and cheapest cost for HD channels, there is no way I could agree on few folks who vouch on TS for AV quality!