Gazing into my crystal ball...

- In the near term (2-3 years), DirecTV's three main satellites will continue to broadcast their current MPEG2 standard. Changing this to MPEG4 would break every single pre-installed DirecTV set-top box, so it's out of the question. The initial roll-out of MPEG4 will only be on a new satellite, requiring a new dish and so forth. They'll be catering to early adopters, particularly HD people.

- That means the HD-Tivos won't be boat anchors for a while, and, if they've got things together and they can make the new channels and services sufficiently compelling, then some of the HD-Tivo people will voluntarily migrate. Never mind that half of the new services are things that the Tivos could do if they only wanted them to (e.g., Tivo HMO). If they get something "close enough" to Tivo, and maybe sweeten the deal somehow in terms of adoption price, then most people will stick with DirecTV and dump Tivo.

- Transmitting HD locals on the satellite is an important move. It lets them charge for something you can get for yourself for free (always a bonus), and it means that people don't have to dork around with hybrid OTA/satellite solutions. It was a pain to get everything done right at my house. I'm sure it's a pain elsewhere, limiting it to early adopters. Doing everything over satellite will radically increase their HD market penetration.

- DirecTV will watch their market demographics for HD. Once they've got a large-enough installed base of the new MPEG4 gear, then they'll look at taking their current #3 satellite (carrying most of the current HD content) and migrating that to MPEG4 (and turning the HD-Tivos into boat anchors). The current #1 and #2 satellites will be the last to switch over, and may well be looking at end-of-life issues, for all we know. How long does a satellite last, anyway?

- In that same 3+ year timeframe, the CableCard disaster will have shaken itself out and will hopefully "just work". Tivo and everybody else will offer dual-tuner HD cable boxes. Hopefully, Tivo's relationships with Japanese and Korean box builders will keep them out in front, in terms of licensing their software.

My crystal ball doesn't have much to say about Internet video-on-demand. Assuming we want to send full DVD images around (4.7GB), then a double-speed (3Mbps) DSL connection would need 3.5 hours to get the full thing (~2 hours of MPEG2 SD-quality or MPEG4 HD-quality). That's about half of real-time. The Tivo model of delayed delivery is certainly compatible with something like this. The wildcard is whether Hollywood will play ball. Do people want their favorite sitcoms in syndication or do they want them on video-on-demand or on DVD or something else?

My crystal ball is also toying with the FCC sticking its nose into the satellite business. Once consumers get happy with CableCard and ditch their cable boxes, they'll start pushing the FCC to make similar mandates to DirecTV, Dish, and Voom (if they're still around). Then you get a world that resembles GSM cel phones. You can use any GSM phone on any network, but there will be sweetheart deals and exclusives on certain gear for certain networks.