With C-band, even the digital signals are not all on the same satellite. So yes, you do switch satellites often. Having a good actuator arm is an important part of any C-band dish system.

This is actually one of the limitations with doing a Tivo-for-C-band. It's possible to have a two-tuner PVR for a digital satellite system because all you need is a double-LNB on the dish to receive two simultaneous signals. But on C-band, the dish has to rotate to get a different satellite so therefore a PVR would be unable to watch one live show while recording another. The other problem is the latency issue, the PVR doesn't know how long it takes to slew the dish and therefore wouldn't know when to send the channel change command afterwards. Also, the C-band receivers are very customizable and you can add/delete satellite entries at will, so the PVR doesn't know which satellites you have in your lineup. Finally (this is probably the biggest sticking point), the IR user interface on the satellite receivers don't have "absolute positioning" buttons which allow you to jump to a specific satellite, you have to use arrows to select them from a screen. There is an on-screen program guide on my receiver (just like the DirecTV guide but not as fast) which lets me choose any show from the entire sky with automatic selection of the bird, but again, this is all relative commands with arrows and cursor selections, the PVR would get no feedback as to what it was selecting.

So the whole PVR thing is a real problem for my C-band dish, and it's the only thing I dislike about C-band. Otherwise, I much prefer C-band to DBS.