Like many Dish Network subscribers, I have been eagerly awaiting CES 2006 because Dish Network’s parent company EchoStar has been expected to unveil the details of its new breed of set top boxes that will feature MPEG-4 standards so that they can send a lot more HD programming to customers. Today, I found that Scott Greczkowski of the SatelliteGuys already had the scoop on Dish Network’s forthcoming CES announcement.

It looks like new standard Dish HD DVR tuner will be the ViP622, which will offer a dual tuner DVR with a 320GB hard drive. This will handle MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 streams, so it will do both standard definition and high definition signals (including a bunch of HD locals — which is the biggest thing satellite TV is currently missing).

I just hope Dish is not going to charge current customers a fortune to upgrade. If they do, I will consider jumping to DirecTV once they have their expanded HD offerings available. I’m sure they will offer a sweet HD package to new customers.