My wife and I had been longtime customers of DirecTV (20 years) and decided it was finally time for a change. We settled on Layer3TV which is a pretty new service, at least in the Dallas area. It streams over your internet service and I love it. My wife is coming around, but when we first signed up the minor differences from DTV were annoying her.
I find the menu system to be superior to DTV and I also like that on demand programming starts immediately rather than having to wait for it to buffer. I also like the ability to record up to 8 programs at a time and that every channel is in HD with 4K content being added. The NASA channel as well as some on demand programming is already in 4K. I also like that it is considerably less expensive. Another great draw for us was the lack of a contract and that we can end service at anytime with no penalty.
The only real dislike I have so far is the energy saver timeout and not being able to disable it. I have contacted the company and they have said they are working on a way to turn it off or extend the timeout. By default you are forced to interact with the remote at least every hour to prevent the box from going to sleep. I understand why they did this since some ISPs have data caps and they want to make sure that you are actually watching if you’re using your data, but my ISP has no such restriction so I’d like to just turn it off as it can be annoying when I am in the middle of a movie.
Is anybody else using the service? I’ve turned a few relatives on to it and they have all switched from DTV as well. I’m curious what others who either currently use the service or have in the past think about it versus standard cable providers.
Asimovian, I haven’t run across a channel that I watched on DTV that is missing from my Layer3 setup. My brother-in-law who I turned onto the service has reported the same thing and we definitely don’t watch the same type of programming. He loves sports, racing, and all things cars while I am more of a movie watcher either through paid network service, broadcast TV stations, or on demand content.
We are paying $100 a month for 4 rooms and 4 premium movie channel packages. After our first 3 months that’ll for up to $120 because 2 of the movie channels were free for 3 months. We were paying $160 a month for DTV with no premium channels.
Not yet available in my area (North metro Atlanta). And I would say $160/mo for DirecTV with no premiums is pretty high; I’m at $117 all-in for 3 rooms with pretty new equipment (a 5-year customer, and had to call and squeeze a bit a year ago to get the price down, but this is not a promotional price).
I vaguely remember seeing sort of IR programming system that might help in your situation. You could program it to send IR codes at specific times. So you could have it programed to send the code of some non-intrusive operation every 50 minutes. I can’t remember the details, but I’m sure you can find it if you search. There may even be systems which work with smartphones to make them into a similar programmable remote if you have an unused one lying around.
Reading back over my post I see I did not include everything. I currently am paying for 4 rooms on Layer3. When I was on DTV paying $160+ a month I had service in 6 rooms. We decided we no longer needed service in my office or the game room and so we did not ask for that from the new provider. Additional rooms with Layer 3 are a flat $10 a month so my bill would be $20 higher than what I currently pay if I had serviced those 2 extra room.
Sorry for leaving out the info about the higher room count WRT my DTV bill.
Another great draw for us was the lack of a contract and that we can end service at anytime with no penalty.