HDTV via Satellite TV Systems

My buddies tv scales up to 1080i - it's mostly by the station - he says.

On DirecTV, the premium channels, HBO, Showtime, DirecTVHD (pay-per-view), etc, and Discovery Channel HD, are nominally 1080i, as is Playboy's Spice Channel, though except for Discovery HD, program material often is really only 480P. National network feeds are 1080i for all but FOX, which originates in 720p at network level. Again, lots of actual program material actually is only 480P, and a lot of that is merely upconverted from standard NTSC 480i. The audio is Dolby Digital, but an awful lot of it is just 2-channel stereo, not 5.1; not DirecTV's fault ... they downlink whatever the provider uplinks to them, just as they do with the standard definition channels. In some, but not all, market areas, what local HDTV as may be made available to DirecTV by the individual stations is provided in whatever format its uplinked. So far, I haven't been all that thrilled by satellite HD; my main TV can upconvert anything to 1080i, and for satellite, I mainly just let it reprocess the NTSC signal. Sometimes that is a noticeably better picture than the HD-from-Satellite. In my situation, I find the OTA HD generally superior to that from DBS. Your mileage may vary, of course.