Both sat companies will have equipment and channels soon, but there may be some more waiting yet. 2006 is moving year for the TV provider industry, if you get my golf reference. The next few months will still be annoying, but it should be getting better as the year goes by.

DirecTV will have an MPEG4 DVR by summer, most likely. But still no date known.

Dish is adding HD locals rapidly this year. Are you sure they aren't available for you? NY seems like it should be first. We just had an announcement that Mpls, MN will be getting them no later than March 13. Note they will be still be MPEG2, although sent in an MPEG4 stream. It will also be HDLite at first, meaning any 1920x1080i network (NBC, CBS, etc) will actually be downrezzed at Dish to 1280x1080i. Hopefully Dish will change that when they go to full MPEG4 usage and have more bandwidth.