I always had Time Warner Cable™ (250+ channels of HDTV baby!) until they jacked up the price roughly 20%. It is because of this that I decided to order DirecTV™ instead. I will save about 50% a month for the same service. However I am a little weary because I have never owned a satelite for my T.V. before and I have heard some horror stories about the reception and quality of the broadcast.
I would like to hear from the satelite owners so that I know what to expect Thursday (sometime between 1pm and 5pm).
Any horror stories or praises?
We just got the Dish Network and have been happy with it. More options for pay-per-view (not that we use it that much) and channels depending on the package you get.
I’ve found that there is actually a longer delay in getting the channel, but that’s not a big deal.
I like the “music only” channels too, where they just play music, showing you the name of the artist, album, etc. Not videos, just music and all sorts of formats.
The music channel is a nice option with plenty of variety to choose from. But from what I recall hearing about satellite service is that it has been known to loose a signal during some pretty minor rainstorms. I certainly hope this is not true as I live in a pretty rainy part of the world. Has this happened to you yet. You said that you just got the Dish Network so probably not. I am not much of television fanatic but there are a few shows I would hate to miss.
Dunno about DirecTV, but my parents have a Canadian version, Bell ExpressVu, and in two years of having it the service has gone off exactly once. For less than thirty seconds. And the TV’s on all day. For every other moment that thing has been on, the service has been absolutely perfect.
Satellite has been MUCH more reliable than cable ever was.
I’ve had DirectTV for about 2 years now and have never experienced any problems. (FTR I never had digital cable) The only inconvenience is having to go out and de-ice the dish during our twice-yearly ice storms we get here in AR so it is no big problem. Great reception, great customer service, great prices/#channels compared to the Comcast Cable we had.
My next door neighbor worked for Comcast - he saw me getting direct TV and inquired why I would switch - hhhmmmm lets see… twice as many channels at 60% of the price and customer service that 1) you can actually reach without waiting 30 minutes and 2) that actually care to help you.
I have had Direct TV for a little over a year. I love it. The service is better then cable. It does go out occasionally durning a really bad storm but it never stays out long. I think that the wind does it more then the rain. My cable use to go out for hours at a time even when it was sunny.
I too recently got to flush Time/Warner in favor of a satellite but went with Dish Network. Overall, I like it much, much more but there are a couple of little things as others have mentioned.
Thunderstorms will sometimes cause you to lose your signal temporarily, but for not near as long as we used to lose our cable during equivalent downpours.
Probably the biggest bummer is that the Weather Channel’s Local Forcast is on dish a regional feed instead of a local one. You can still roughly tell when an approaching line of storms will impact your area but not nearly as accurately as with a true local signal.
There is a delay of a couple of seconds when you surf as the satellite acquires the signal.
The positives, however, are pretty strong.
Nary another cent to Time/Whiner.
Good schedule guide.
Easy pay-per-view.
Excellent classic rock station, jazz, reggae, etc.
You can dig all you want in your yard w/o encountering the utility tampon string.
As far as Direct vs Dish, it’s just up to your channel preference. I’ve seen both and it’s just whatever floats your Ivory.
Plus, and this is really cool, whenever you’re up on your roof and you look out across your neighborhood, everyone else’s dish is also pointing up in the same direction so it looks like that site out in Arizona or Nevada or wherever where all those satellites are arrayed attempting to listen to outerspace. Homegrown SETI!
Good. I think I made the right decision to go with satellite service. Where I live I have no choice but TWC and they just jacked their prices up I was paying about $80 a month and this is without Roadrunner! Talk about highway robbery. TWC knows that no one has a choice if they want a land line cable service so they charge the highest prices set by the FCC. I don’t know why it has not been challenged for operating a monopoly in my area but it should not be legal. It used to be I only had one choice for my gas/electric and phone service here and I know that recent legislation has changed all that, but not for cable.
Not completely true. HBO and the Discovery channel broadcast some programming in HD on DirecTV, and Showtime is experimenting with it. And as for the broadcast flavor, in addition to the antenna you need a digital receiver to view it, which can be in the form of a set-top box or an integrated TV set.
I recently moved to a new area, and had to do all the research on this subject. Here were the pro’s and cons of my choices:
DirecTV: Only choice that had NFL Sunday ticket this year. That pretty much sealed it. But they don’t carry UPN (no Buffy! No Star Trek!), and, in fact, only offer local stations in limited areas. Also, it makes the PiP on my TV near-useless, and I think you’re limited to 2 TVs/dish. Another thing that they don’t tell is that, for most of the channels, you’re getting the East Coast feed (which takes some getting used to, let me tell you).
Dish: Better prices and more channesl than DirecTV, but no Sunday ticket. If football wasn’t a priority, I would have gotten Dish.
Cable: Thieving bastards, and no Sunday Ticket. They raised the price on Digital Cable about 20% within two months of offering it. If they offered cable modems, I still would have considered them.
I ended up geting the $10/month Cable option for the local channels combined with DirecTV. It’s working fairly well so far, with the only pain being having to keep the receivers plugged in to the same phone line behind the DSL filters.
I hate the MPEG compression they use in all the digital cable and dish systems. You can see compression artifacts in fast moving scenes, especially things like bright flashing explosions across a dark background, or a pan across a waving field of grass, etc. Everything goes blocky. At least the dish systems are less compressed than digital cable. I heard that DSS only compresses about 6:1 but cable is 8:1 or 12:1 so the cable picture shows more compression artifacts.
After I spent all this money on expensive high quality Sony Trinitron^2 screens, and now they want to deliver a compressed signal to me. Feh.