This is starting to seem like I love Directv or something. Not really true, I'm just glad they finally updated their HD DVR. But anyway. . . So I already made a post about how much the HR-20 reciever kicks butt in general a week or so ago. But what I forgot about was the fact it is interactive. Im a huge fan of football / fantasy football. Basically, an interactive box is no big deal, you can get the weather or loto numbers etc. But when it comes to SuperFan which is the Sunday Ticket enhancement for HD users, it starts to become really useful. First take a look at the pictures:


With SuperFan, you can finally add players on channel 795 from your fantasy football team to track their stats throughout the day. (up to nine) Please note that to get the player updates, you must be on the football channels. This is shown in action on the first picture. It is not the best, but it does alert you of the more important plays when alerts are set to "high", such as if your QB reaches 250 yards passing. I assume the low alerts might only alert if you score a TD. The alerts flash up pretty quick, so dont blink. It is definitely a nice feature, although I am told that Tivo has the ability to add your cbs fantasy team to get updates to. It would be nice if Directv creates some partnership similar to that but I highly doubt it. =\ Although, I am sure everyone has a computer running to get live scoring in your league anyway.

The best feature has to be the score overlay that you can bring up on any football game. Basically, when you go to a game you will see a bar that says press red for scores. And yes, this does get annoying and i wish I could shut it off after the first time. But as you can see from the second picture, it alerts you of who has the bar and where on the field the ball is. Red is for redzone and Green is for just scored. Then you simply select the game you want and press enter and it will default to going to the HD version of the game (thankfully). Sometimes it does get lagged however, but overal it really is great to be able to get a view on all the games going on while still watching the game you want. The only thing I'll mention about the GameMix is that it is too small to be useful to me personally. Also, this seems to be a bit buggy too, because when I clicked the green button for more stats it basically screwed the DVR up and I had to unplug to fix it.

On a side note, users of the DVR will notice that when you go to the local channels ( at least in the NY area) such as 2,4,5,7 you will notice they are in HD now. Before the only HD channels were in the 80s. The reason for this is that they are broadcasted in mpeg-4 and *should* look better although I have yet to really compare it.