I am beginning to really hate Cox Cable and want to get away from them.
I keep seeing commercials regarding the options of either Dish or DirecTV and wanted to know what others have at home.
True about strong wind and/or clouds causing interruption in service? We have few clouds here, but wind would be a factor if that really made a difference.
Obviously want the major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC and even FOX) plus would like to have some of the other major cable networks (USA, FX, Bravo, HGTV) as part of the “basic package”. I assume those all come with every package, even the cheapest and most basic?
Other than hating Cox for lots of reasons, I am looking to save some money so price is important - best deal for lowest price; what is your basic bill for about 100 or so channels?
In the old days, multiple room hook ups cost more - we need to have four rooms with TV’s working - plus at least one DVR located in main living room. Is this included in base price now?
Would like to get the German station, but not a deal breaker. Would also like to get some free movie channels - not necessarily Showtime and HBO (I know those usually cost extra), but it would be cool to get IFC and Sundance. What “free” movie channels come with basic service.
Lastly - any other comments or suggestions welcome; both good and bad experiences with Dish or DirecTV.
Not clouds, and surely strong wind only matters if your antenna mount is flimsy. We lose our DirecTV if there is a thunderstorm approaching from within a few miles from our south, which isn’t often. Otherwise weather is no issue.
I never remember what we get. But, we got cable internet access about 5 years ago and looked into switching the TV to cable as well, for simplicity. Even though they already had cable serving our house, they wanted to charge quite a bit more to match what DirecTV was selling us.
We pay about $62 per month for a fairly basic but not rock bottom package. I don’t know how many channels it is.
Don’t know. We only have one. Up till several years ago we had a second, and it added I think $5 per month.
Don’t know.
Based on our experience and research and the comments our grown kids give us when they come to visit (they live within a few miles and have some of the same provider options), the satellite TV is a fair bit better for the money, and the fidelity of local cable is also often criticized. By the way, for some time we also had satellite internet service with DirecWay, and that turned out so badly I actually pulverized their equipment in my driveway with a sledgehammer. But TV has been fine. If nothing big changes we wouldn’t consider switching.
Maybe it doesn’t matter to you, but no satellite system will carry local PEG (Public/Education/Government) channels, as those exist only by agreement with cable companies. In my area, that means you would miss about 15 channels, and what they broadcast is not available anywhere else. To some customers, that’s a deal breaker.
Don’t assume anything until you read the details. Just scanning through the basic package for DirecTV I notice they don’t offer the Fox Movie Channel, National Geographic or Oxygen – all of which are carried by my cable company.
I also notice in the fine print that the basic package costs $29.99/mo. for the first year, then $44.99/mo. for the second. Even my cable company never tried to shove a $15/mo. increase down my throat.
It’s been years since I had satellite (I had DirecTV), but we had only minor problems with outages. Really heavy precipitation would make it break up for us, but most of the time it was solid. Our cable goes out sometimes too, so I honestly wouldn’t think of that as a major disadvantage to satellite. Some of it does depend on where you’re located (which direction and angle the dish has to point). We can’t get satellite here because we’re so far north that the dish has to point at a very shallow angle, and there’s a dense clump of very tall trees right in the way.
There are some other reasons I don’t really want satellite even though I’m not a huge fan of the cable company, but I’m not sure they’d be important to you (I’m more picky about this stuff than most people). FWIW, though it’s been 10 years since I had DirecTV, I have been paying attention to developments and have friends with both Dish and DirecTV, so these impressions are based on recent experience.
The HD picture quality is often not as good (though this does depend on the channel and your cable company – some of the HD cable channels are really compressed and it looks worse than satellite).
The DVRs are bad (maybe not as bad as the cable company’s, which are truly horrid, but worse than TiVo which is what I have).
You can’t effectively use TiVo (there are some old DirecTV TiVo boxes, but they don’t do HD; renewed DirecTV support for TiVo is supposedly coming, but it’s not here yet).
The interface outside of the DVR functionality isn’t really to my taste either (Dish’s is way worse than DirecTVs IMHO).
It’s somewhat harder to have TVs throughout the house (not just monthly cost, but cabling and equipment for each TV).
You have to have an ugly dish on your house.
Anyway, obviously YMMV. I know a lot of people who have satellite and are very happy with it. I would encourage you to go to a store that has both systems set up so you can play with them and see what it’s like. If it seems ok to you, and the plans work well for you, I’d say go for it.
Cox Cable is one of my lease favorite companies on Earth. They are just horrible.
Switching to DirecTV was one of the best decisions of my life. At the time, I paid like $5 less per month for the exact same channels. DirecTV’s customer service is excellent while Cox’s is awful. I have since bundled my service with Verizon DSL and saved even more money.
There isn’t a problem with clouds but I do get poor reception when there is a heavy storm which is in frequent around here.
I haven’t had a problem of any sort with their DVR. Well, one did break but it was because the hard drive failed. I had it for years and DirecTV replaced it for free and the technician also readjusted my dish for free while he was here.
I have Dish network - can’t say wind ever knocks it out as far as I know (direct roof mount). Lose it occasionally from very heavy thunderstorms - not really any more often than cable would go out and most of the time I only lose the channels on the spotbeam satellites even when I do lose something (spotbeam contains your local channels). As far as DVR Quality I have had Cablevision, Insight, Comcast, and Dish network DVRs as well as Tivo, Windows Media Center (both XP and Vista), and MythTV. I would say Dish network DVR is right in the middle of the pack - better than comcast for sure but not nearly as good as MythTV or Tivo, which I would rank as the top - Tivo for ease of use and MythTV for features.
Extra rooms definitely cost more (especially if you want HD), because you need separate boxes for each room, and extra satellite dishes if you need too many rooms. I know Dish network can handle 4 rooms with one dish if you do 2 HD and 2 standard def - the wiring for that is run to two boxes which each serve 1 HD and 1 Standard def TV (and the standard def TV uses an RF remote that goes through the wall to tell the box in another room what to do). I personally don’t even have those boxes as I have all HDTV and just opted for two rooms of service and two individual boxes to keep it simple.
This is reminding me of three interesting details.
First, not only didn’t we have cable in our area (back then), we also didn’t have a view of the southern sky from our house. But the barn did offer such a view. We put a satellite dish out there and put coax in a ditch to connect it to the house.
IIRC I also had to add an amplifier and something to inject a DC-coupled supply into the coax with a local power supply in the barn, because the resistance along the coax made the local horn amplifier voltage sink too low. I must apologize because I can’t remember for sure if this was the DirecTV or our now-defunct DirecWAY internet setup - I may be giving information irrelevant to TV!
Third, they do something that seems really dumb to me regarding the signal polarization. DirecTV satellite signals are transmitted with circular polarization (meaning it is like there is a AA battery cell in space that is oriented perpendicular to the line of sight and spinning at 90,000,000,000 RPM). They pack more information into their beam by providing two separate transmissions on the same frequency but with the circular polarization spinning in opposite directions. All the even channel numbers spin one way and all the odd channel numbers spin the other. They put two amplifiers in a standard horn assembly, the gadget sitting in the middle of the dish, and can switch an amplifier to work with either clockwise or counterclockwise polarization. I think this must have to do more with the antenna itself, but nothing mechanical happens, it’s purely electronic and executed inside a component they call the LNB or “low noise (amplifier) block”. I think they should have made one amp run clockwise and the other counterclockwise, so all the signals are available. But instead they let the receiver, indoors, send a DC-coupled control voltage that IIRC is either around 5 or around 15 volts, which tells the amp to run CW or CCW. That is, they don’t use multiple LNB amps to get CW and CCW, they use multiple LNB amps to give each television set control over which mode its dedicated amp runs in. With two amps they can do that for two different TVs. But for three TVs you need four amps in two horns in two separate dishes. You could cobble something together that lets people choose between even channels or odd channels with a switch, maybe, but the whole deal is complicated and messy. We never had more than two TVs and have only had one for years, but if you want several, you’d want to look into this further.
A low end (but not rock bottom) satellite package is usually more channels that that. Based on the price, I’d guess at least 200.
Then again, our local Cox is twice what you are paying, so if you have everything you watch, and none of the low-end satellite companies have the shows you like to watch, you might have a better deal.
O know that my parents had some sort of direct tv/little dish on the side of the house. It was seriously annoying because you had one remote for the tv, and one for the service, and an additional antenna for stuff the little dish didnt carry, and some channels you watched on tv channels and changed with the tv remote, and others you watched on the dish remote so just watching tv was a whole process depending on what you wanted to watch. I just hid in the spare bedroom and streamed stuff on my laptop.
I have a low-end, foreign-language package, and it’s just about $32 dollars to month. That’s not promotional, I’ve had the package for nine years now, although it was only $30 up until some time ago. Maybe it’s just not available for new customers any more. I’m not sure how many channels I get (and my home computer seems to have gone offline several weeks ago, so I can’t check). I get most my television via cable, though, and honestly I’d ditch the DirecTV if my local Comcast had the normal Spanish channels everyone else seems to have. Heck, that’s not even accurate. Since not being at home for almost a year, I get most of my television from other, non-broadcast sources.
No, no, as Bijou Drains said, PBS is not a PEG channel. PEG channels are local (very local) channels often called public access. The channel space is provided only by the cable company (not satellite) as a result of FCC rules. Typically they are run by local (city, town, village) governments or under contract to them and carry government meetings, community events and news. You know – the stuff that is ignored by commercial TV stations.
We also carry shows from other PEG channels across the nation and even the world, 95% of which are not available anywhere else, not even YouTube or any Internet site.
Maybe not your cup 'o tea, but we have our fans who couldn’t do without watching their government officials [del]make a fool of themselves[/del] working for the public.
DirecTv for 4 years now. 100% satisfied with all aspects including (possibly especially) CS and Tech Support.
I’m in a small town, and the Time Warner Cable TV in our area is notoriously crappy. First and foremost- picture quality that often reminded me of the bad old days of rabbit ears.
Dish Network user here of 5 years. I never have problems with wind or rain and I live in a windy area. I believe the basic package starts around $29. As far as tech support, I’ve had a couple of box failures. They’ll send you a new one via UPS with easy insuctions for replacing it and sending in your old box. I don’t think either time I was down more than a day.
I’ve got Dish. When analog converted into digital last summer I was forced into it. The Fed. gov. subsided converter box didn’t work–even after getting an indoor antenna. Boy, was I pissed. Never paid for TV and didn’t want to–now especially (I’ve got some stuff going on and I don’t need any more expenses).
$10/mo. (pretty good). I live in an apartment building with its own mega satellite dish at the back end of the property. All the apartments are wired. All I had to do was screw a cable into my TV and the other end into the wall. No box. No installation.
I’ve got the regular network stations that I had before including PBS. And now I get things like USA, TLC, TBS, CNN, Discovery, Cartoons, whatever… Good enough. I subscribe to Netflix (DVDs come in the mail) for movies and things I don’t have time to watch on a regular schedule. Love Netflix.
We lose the satellite connection once in a while. About 10 minutes ago a thunderstorm was approaching so it went off for 3-4 minutes. I can deal with that. In almost a year that I’ve had it, it doesn’t happen that often. And, hey, the price is right.
I have almost nothing but good things to say about DirecTV (had it for about five years). I’ve probably had a total of 30 seconds of outages in that five years. For the same price as my cable co (Comcast, who are the worst), I get more channels, more HD channels, plus they have a lot of free perks that are surprisingly useful, such as the sports mix channel that shows every sporting event currently on.
Also, the DVR software is the best I’ve seen (and yes, I’ve had a Tivo).
