Everyone I know complains about how they get tv, no matter which method they use. Which one is actually the best deal $ wise? I don’t need movie channels like hbo and I don’t want a zillion channels, just the good ones like comedy central and the history channel. Help!
I dunno. Cable is a rip off in my area, though. For months, it was always going out, and staying out for hours. So I started calling them and asking for credit everytime this happened, and bingo, it hardy ever goes out now, but it’s still high. What do you use now?
It depends on your criteria. I had a DSS dish when I lived in the sticks but it’s in storage now. Picture clarity is astonishingly good, vastly better than analog cable. Programming wasn’t cheap, about the cost of cable with a decent variety of packages available. The only significant down side is only being able to tune a single channel. If you want to record one and watch another you need two recievers. I paid a hefty price for my Sony reciever as I was an early adopter but they’re almost giving the recievers away these days.
My folks have a big C-band dish. Programming is much cheaper because of competition between programming providers, the same channels can be purchased from multiple sources.
Dish Netork is okay. They make $$ selling a dish. YOu can buy a dish cheap at ebay.com or surplusauction.com then have it activated & choose what lineup you want.
If you get cable, yes they are a rip off. If you are rural, no. If you are a serious sports nut, definitely not with that sports package they can set you up (I think its something like 12 channels of all sports.). Even with the premium service (giving you something like 6 diffrent versions of HBO and 9 of The Movie Channel) there is only so many times I can watch Beetlejuice and Die Hard in a day
Do yourself a favor and stick with cable (and maybe get a descrambler. I don’t have one but a pal of mines loves his.)
Right now I am paying @ $37 for basic cable + a couple of specialty (CC, SCi-FI)and I hate sports, I just want some decent TV stations and a deal I’m not locked into and costs less. Is there hope?
My advice to you is to look around most definitely. A 37 dollar fee for basic cable is way too much (at my service I pay 20 and get those two networks included). Basically, scan your bill to see if you are getting charged for stuff you do not need. If not, seriously consider switching, since box rental is what you should be paying the most for. Currently, I pay for 2 boxes, basic service, a cable modem rental and still get it in at 80 dollars a month (50 of it is the cable modem) which is not bad considering how much I use it.
If you cannot find another service in your area, then yes perhaps you need a dish, though be careful, you will not be able to access local networks usually. That can be good for some bad for others.
We have DirectTV, and personally, I love it. There’s a bazillion channels, but they’re fairly easy to navigate through. And right now, if you buy your dish at Blockbuster, you get a full year of unlimited rentals! It’d be worth it in my book, especially if you have 2 VCRs…
I’m getting a little tired of DSS because of constant price increases (they just raised the price of pay-per-view movies by $1), general rate increases, and removal of channels from my lineup and putting them into a separate package with a separate fee. And most of the channels are for sports, which I have no interest in, more than half the available channels are useless to me, there isn’t enough cultural content, and too much NFL NBA and WWF.
The satellite prices used to be cheaper back in the early days when they were competing with cable, but now that they have a large installed base, they seem to want to gouge the customers. Just like cable did.