Preface
Page II EchoStar International Corporation
© 2001 EchoStar International Corporation
All rights reserved
channel-down. There may be two dozen different keys on the remote but after pressing the
power-on key most of the time it is just zapping through the channel list.
And zapping, and zapping and ..... zapping. If you spend just 15 seconds on each channel
and zap non-stop it will take you 12 ½ hours to go through 3,000 TV channels. Besides the
wear and tear on your up / down keys, not to mention your thumb, this is nobody's idea of fun
especially since most of these channels are completely uninteresting to you. In fact there may
be no more than 200 or 300 channels worth watching (only about one hour of continuous
zapping .....).
There was one other change and that was that with so many channels you wanted the
possibility to zap through a single type of channel. For example if there is some breaking
news story you might want to zap from one news channel to the next to the next without
seeing cartoon channels, or music TV channels. Similarly when you want to relax for the
evening you want to go though your movie channels without bumping into a football match or
the latest reports from Wall Street.
2.3. ZAPPING ONLY WHAT YOU WANT TO ZAP: ECHONAV
To deal with all these channels and the changing way that people watch TV, the software
engineers at EchoStar have resurrected the tried and true channel list approach of the
venerable LT-8700 and enhanced it to deal with the demanding requirements of today's
world. We call this new system EchoNAV and this is included in all of our new line of
receivers.
EchoNAV gives you eight lists for your TV channels and eight lists for your radio channels. So
now for example you can put all your sports channels into a single list. When you want to
watch sports just select your that list and zap till you find the match you want.
If you want to keep the kids entertained then pick the children's programming list, give them
the remote control, and fear not that they may wander where they ought not to.
Looking for an update on some news item? Zap your news channels list till you come across
it. You won't be wasting your time flicking past all the general entertainment channels in your
quest to find your information.
But we also realized that in some households it makes more sense to divide up the channels
per person - ‘John's List’ or ‘Mom's List’ for example. So in EchoNAV we give you complete
flexibility in renaming each of the eight lists (you use an on-screen keyboard to create the
name you want), and with a capacity of 250 channels in each list, there's more than enough
room to hold all your favorites. In most households you can give one list to each person and
still have a few leftover (make a neighbor happy?)
Having lots of lists is particularly nice in radio mode. Put your pop music channels into one list
and your classical radio into another. Then zap. It is striking how much nicer it is when you
don't constantly tune to a type of music that you don't really want to listen too.
2.4. HUNDREDS OF HOURS OF VIDEO RECORDINGS
The power and user-friendliness of EchoNAV is hardly limited to organizing and zapping lists
of TV and radio channels. For those satellite receivers with a build-in hard disk drive such as
the DVR-7000, it is possible to record many hours of TV programs. It is much simpler to
record on a DVR than it used to be on a normal VCR. Just press the record button and you
instantly record the channel you are watching. The simplicity of setting a timer to record
something in the future is even more striking: in the Electronic Program Guide screen just
highlight the program you want to record (up to 4 weeks in advance!), choose the timer
function, and the start time, stop time and program name will all be automatically set.
Initial feedback shows that people are recording far more frequently than they ever used to
with a VCR. Now consider that the capacity of hard-disk drives is growing rapidly. It is
expected that within a few years total recording capacity could reach over two hundred hours.
That's a lot of content - several shelves of video-cassettes in today's terms.