I’ve had Time Warner (blows ass), AT&T (massive rip off) for cable. I’ve also had Dish and more recently Directv. I like Dish way more than Directv. I find Dish’s Tivo to be more user friendly and more options. I also get this crappy gray screen from my Directv DVR, instead of, you know, regular programming.
Why don’t you call the dish people, tell them what you’re interested in getting, and ask them how much it costs?
FWIW, we switched from cable (Comcast) to the Dish Network late last year.
Good: More channels. You do get more sports channels than cable, and you get a lot of premium movie channels (multiple HBO’s, etc).
Bad: Sometimes the dish loses it’s signal and we have to wait for it to re-calibrate. Doesn’t happen that often, but it’s an annoyance we didn’t have to deal with under cable.
Closed Captioning SUCKS on the dish. Garbled text, repeating the same lines over and over, it’s bad enough that some stuff is unwatchable if you depend on the CC.
Dish is mind bogglingly complex with multiple television setups, and we’ve had to spend quite a bit of time on the phone with their support people.
Cost is a little higher than cable.
We’ll probably wind up switching back to cable…
I have had DirecTV for a few months now and am quite happy with it. One of the main reasons I love it is for the same reason I love the return of AT&T wireless and the debut of the iPhone in Alaska…we finally get pricing even remotely in line with the rest of the country. For mobile phone service (pre-iPhone) and cable, local companies have been pretty free to charge whatever the hell the felt like charging for services. And of course they felt no need to stay caught up with the game in terms of HD channels, etc. The DVR and the selection of HD channels on DirecTV are superior in every way to GCI, the local cable purveyor.
The only weather related issue I’ve ever had with the dish was when it was covered, quite literally, by 2-plus feet of snow in a day…the signal faded for a while but was back within hours. The biggest thing keeping me from switching before was the myth (perpetuated by DirecTV themselves even) that you NEED a home phone to have service. My installer assured me that this was not so, hooked me up, and then “look ma, no cable!”
Me too.
Tech support seems pretty good.
I’ve had DirecTV/Way since it’s inception when they where selling them at Sears.
Pretty happy overall.
I’ve used Time Warner Cable in NYC and DirecTV in Baltimore.
DirecTV was very nice at the time (1997-99), it had features like on-screen menus and out-of-area channels way before cable did. But, it was very prone to weather conditions. Rainstorms (not windy conditions) had the biggest impact, the signal would drop out for up to 5-10 minutes at a time during heavy rain or snow.
On the other hand the picture quality seemed better than cable was at the time.
Coming back to NYC in 1999, I looked into getting DirecTV but had trouble getting the “clear line of sight to the south” that is required to install a network dish. Too many tall, old-growth trees in my part of Queens, it seems. Well, good. I certainly value the trees more than satellite TV service!
So while satellite TV is not an option for me now, a friend of mine has DirecTV service at his house nearby. He loves it but admits that he is subject to dropouts when it storms. So that problem is still there.
By now, I’m quite happy with digital cable with HD programming (and bundled internet service). I’ve never had problems with their customer service; on the contrary, the guys who come to run new lines have been prompt, quick, friendly and knowledgeable. The few times I’ve had to call on the phone I’ve only had to wait about 5 minutes, about what I’d expect. Best of all, they have a store location in a mall about 10 minutes away from me, so I can run in and get cable box upgrades (like when I first got HD service, or upgraded my DVR box) and swap in the box myself without making a service appointment.
If/when FiOS comes into my area I’ll check it out. I have noticed more pixelation in the HD channels since they’ve expanded their HD channel offerings, probably due to increased compression to fit more HD signals on the same bandwidth.
Who did the installation? You or one of their techs?
I have done a Dish Network self-install and only had trouble with the key step of getting the dish mount perfectly plumb. The wiring was no worse than a stereo system.
My current hookup has one “DishPro 1000” dish on the roof with multiple LNBs and two dual-tuner DVR receivers, each feeding one local HD set and one remote standard-def set. The hardest part was getting the remote TVs to auto-scan and find the channel that the PVR transmits on.
Cost per month for the two dual-head DVR boxes feeding four TVs, the Top 200 package, HD “essentials” and the local channels is just under $80 a month.
I have DishNetwork and love it. My mother has Comcast and it drives me crazy not to be able to see program listings a week in advance. Her on-screen program guide is hard to use and customize, and her remote is very unwieldy. I’ve seen the DirecTv program listing and wasn’t thrilled about them, either. Their C/S is great - easy to get on the phone and always pleasant. I’ve lost a receiver once, and they had a new one to me in a couple days. The only con is that very rarely I will lose my signal due to weather. It has to be pretty bad out for my picture to go out, though. Once I had a branch grow right in front of the receiver, and I had to cut that back, but otherwise it works wonderfully. And how did I live without a DVR?
StG
We have DishNetwork and have been fairly pleased. I was considering switching to DirectTV (we do not have access to cable) because of more HD channels, but Dish just added several yesterday including Sci-Fi, USA, ESPNews, and some others. They also announced they would be adding more this year.
The only time we have had a problem with losing the signal is during very heavy rains.
I think those sports packages are sold separately (I don’t subscribe). So if you subscribe to the NFL package for example, you get all the NFL games, but you would have to subscribe separately for the college gameplan or the NBA.
The techs.
The setup just seemed insanely complicated compared to cable. Oh, one of the tv’s is HD. It has a massive group of wires going in and out of the television, to 3 - 4 small boxes, and in/out of a coax cable AND a telephone jack. I can hook up any video or audio device, stereo, computer, or what have you, and lemme tell ya, just looking at all that crap needed for high def gives me a headache…
We switched from Comcast to DirecTV last year, and we are not very happy with it. Some reasons are:
[ul]
[li]No localized Weather Channel. We have to contend with a regional version (i.e. “South”). [/li][li]TiVo doesn’t have a satellite tuner (at least ours doesn’t), so it needs to be hooked up to the satellite receiver box. Our satellite box doesn’t have a serial port so we have to use an IR controller. Works OK, but not as elegant, and need to be careful not to change channels manually.[/li][li]Severe weather can affect signal.[/li][li]The antenna installer drilled holes in our roof, which may be causing a leak. (We’re still not 100% sure where the leak is, but the stain/mold on the ceiling is right below the antenna.)[/li][li]Our satellite receivers (we have 2) are very unreliable - they’d crash and need to be reset. One time I lost several days of scheduled TiVo recordings because the receiver had crashed and I hadn’t noticed it. [/li][li]Need to get broadband Internet separately. We have DSL, which is noticeably slower than cable.[/li][/ul]
We had Dish Network up till two years ago, when we switched to Mediacom cable.
The number of channels was better on Dish Network although it ticked me off that we had to take the America’s Top 200 to get SpeedTV (turned out to be the same way for cable - we had to upgrade the selection to get the channels we wanted).
Reliability was better on Dish as well; the cable channel consistently futzed up one of our local channels. With Dish we would occasionally have outages during storms but when we upgraded our antenna it stopped that issue almost entirely.
Cable was a better price for the first year, as we had our internet service with them also, but when the special price expired and we were due to renew, I called and asked if they had any specials for renewing customers and they told me no. Meanwhile our cost for TV and cable internet had doubled. So we changed our internet service to DSL, dropped cable TV altogether, and then started getting calls from the cable company about a month later asking us to resubscribe and offering discounts. After I’ve gone through the hassle of changing everything over? Not a chance.
So now we have DSL and no pay TV at all. But we have decided that once we do get pay TV again, we’ll go back to Dish Network. Screw Mediacom.