Looking at my bill and deciding that I’m paying too much. Time to look at alternatives and thought I’d see if anyone here has switched or has current info on side-by-side.
I’ve looked at some of the satellite message boards and the fanboi noise for both sides is as bad as the gun threads here. Not going to wade through all the crap.
Data points.
I haven’t been under contract for years so early termination fees aren’t a consideration.
I don’t watch sports so DTV doesn’t get any points on that.
I’m not enought of a technophile for slight differences in HD quality to be relevent. Who has the best HD seems to be a hot topic among the fanbois. I don’t give a damn.
Both services carry most of the channels I’m interested in in their basic packages. ABC/CBS/NBC/USA/TNT/etc.
What I need input on.
Whole house systems. 3 rooms actually. Genie -v- Hopper. What’s the cost per room/receiver. How easy they are to set up and use.
How intuitive the menu systems are.
How easy it is to set up to record a complete series of shows.
I’ll be calling Dish in the next week or so to find out what their specific offers are right now. Then I’ll talk to the DirecTV retention rep to find out what they can do to keep me. I’ve been a customer for about 12 years and have only talked to the retention team once to get a free DVR upgrade so I won’t feel bad about that at all.
We just hooked back up with DirecTV after getting an HD TV. I didn’t consider DISH but don’t really have a good reason for dismissing them. My neighbors had it for awhile and went back to DirecTV, said DTV had better reception.
Plus, didn’t DISH have a disagreement with AMC awhile back? I’m remembering a message on AMC while watching Breaking Bad or Mad Men, saying DISH customers wouldn’t be getting that network.
I’m paying $55 a month for 12 months and then $65 a month for the following 12 months, for TV’s in three places – two in the house and one in the garage – and 3 Genies. We got the package that’s one up from the bottom, because it includes NFL Sunday ticket. For the first three months we have all the movie channels (45) but we’ll be dumping them after the three months is up.
It’s easy to navigate and set up recordings. We have the new remote, the RC71, which is annoying, because the manual and the customer service guide is geared to the old remote. But if you don’t live in the test area (Iowa, Arizona, some parts of California), that shouldn’t be a problem.
I’ve had to e-mail customer service because I couldn’t get my on-line account working – it wanted to revert to my old account from three years ago. I got a prompt and helpful response. That’s a plus.
So far, the only thing I can’t figure out is how to get the guide to show me just the channels we get. It’s a PITA to select a channel and get a message that it’s not in our package.
The installer was great, spent about three hours getting everything set up, and he didn’t leave until all three sets were working, and he’d explained the remote functions. I don’t know if he had other appointments, but I didn’t get the impression that he was in a hurry.
I have Dish. Recording all of a series is trivial. Go to an entry for the series on the program guide, press select, press record all new shows, and you are done. You can search also. You can also record all shows, including reruns.
I’ve never had a problem with the menu system but I use command line, so I might not be the best judge of complexity.
We have a remote system in another room we had put in when my father-in-law was staying and monopolizing the main TV. It was trivial.
But the best thing is customer service. When our DVR died (and the replacement died) I made heavy use of it. First, the recording before gives you an excellent and logically ordered list of potential fixes - but you can always go directly to a person - and the recording tells you how. And all the reps I spoke to were first rate. They never did a “did you plug it in bit” or read from a screen of canned directions. All the ones I spoke to ranked in the top five or ten of customer service people I ever spoke to.
Very, very rarely have an outage (less than once per year, but I’m in the Bay Area) and the DVR is a lot smarter about rebooting than it used to be.
No experience with DirecTV, but I do like Dish and have never been tempted to switch.
I forgot to mention. With the new Genie, you can watch one program and record up to four other programs at the same time. Or you can record five programs at once, if you’re not watching anything.
This is especially helpful on Sunday nights, aka The Best Night on Television.
Yes, but DTV has has their own scuffles of that sort with other stations, so that’s not really a reason to pick either over the other. They’re both perfectly happy to let their customers suffer while in a pissing contest with the equally jerkwad stations.
I have Dish and am very happy with it. My parents have Direct TV and, really, the only difference that I can see is that they pay more than I do. A LOT more. I have a very basic plan, though. For instance, I don’t get AMC or IFC or any “radio-on-TV”, but if I were to upgrade my plan, I could. I supplement with Netflix and Pandora. Most of the shows I want to see on those channels (The Walking Dead, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Portlandia, etc.) come out on Netflix streaming after about a year. I just have to actively avoid spoilers.
As far as Dish’s squabble with AMC, I’m glad they did it. The way I see it, Dish took a stand to keep my bill lower. I saw the whole thing as AMC having a couple hit shows and trying to bully the carriers into paying more. The other carriers caved, but Dish stood up to them. Sure, I like the shows, but I also like that Dish has balls to stand up for it’s customers. Once they worked out a deal, AMC re-ran all of The Walking Dead episodes that Dish customers would have missed up to that point, and Dish offered AMC for free to all of their tiers during that time. (Mad Men and Breaking Bad were on hiatus at that time).
We had just had new receivers installed in the kids’ rooms when Dish came out with their Hopper (almost exactly the same as Direct TV’s Genie). I’m looking forward to when that 2 years is up and I can upgrade the whole house to the Hopper.
Customer service has always been great the few times we had any issues with the hardware. My parents live about 2 miles away from me. We both have unobstructed views of the southern sky. I’ve found that their Direct TV goes out more often in bad weather than our Dish does.
Dish is going to have to do a lot wrong, or Direct TV will have to get substantially cheaper, before I consider switching.
BTW, I have had Dish for about 5 years now. I switched from Comcast which got way too expensive.
Need? Definately not. I did consider going straight Nteflix. etc. But want is sufficient for now so I’ll stay current with my shows.
Both sides have had their spats so that’s mostly a wash as far as points to either side.
I had already checked many of the online reviews and most of them seem to come down squarely in the middle. I’m following up here to find out if anyone knows of any major issues that I might have missed elsewhere. It’s looking like it’s going to come down to a decision based on finance. Not a bad result I suppose.
I’ve had DirectTV for over a decade now and the only time I lose signal is during extremely bad weather. I strongly believe that reception issues fall squarely on the competency of the installer.
Note that you have to have ‘real’ broadband internet to do this.
I currently have DSL and it’s not good enough.
I’m at the very edge of our town and have very limited options - AT&T want’s $100 to install fiber.
My plan is to get good internet, then drop DISH and replace my home phone w/ VoIP.
Sounds like we’re using similar equipment, except for the remotes. I’ve found two ways…if you’re just watching TV, you can press “Info”, move over to “Favorites”, and select “Channels I get”. In the channel guide, press the dash button or the yellow button (which your remote appears to be lacking?), and select “Change favorites list”.
I can do the first part and get to “Channels I Get”, but there’s no yellow button, and when my husband accidentally hit the Dash button, I had a dickens of a time getting the remote to control the TV again. I’m not sure what the Dash button is for.
Maybe I’ll e-mail customer support again. Or not.
Mostly we’re watching what we watched with cable. The main benefit I’m seeing is HD channels, and the ability to record and watch later. But for two years, we’re paying about the same as we paid with cable, which had a lousy lineup.
Very strange! On my remote, pressing the dash button brings up a tiny box containing the DVR’s internet connection status.
I switched from cable to satellite a few months ago…I picked DirecTV because that’s what we had at home when I was growing up, and I never knew us to have major problems with them (though we had signal problems in later years as the surrounding trees grew taller). My cable package with Time Warner claimed to offer HD programming, but its quality is absolutely pathetic when compared with DirecTV’s HD channels. I also can’t get over how awesome it is to have access to all of my channels, plus the DVR recordings, in other rooms of the house. I had an older DVR setup with cable; the full package was available in the family room with the TiVo, and the rest of the house had access to just a dwindling number of the old “analog” channels. Besides my introductory trial offer of the premium movie channels, the package I selected is pretty much identical to my old cable package. Oh, and I love having access to the on-demand channels again! Something about the way the TiVo connects blocks access to these with cable.
Speaking of On Demand channels, I was all excited about rewatching The Sopranos, but when I try, I get a message saying my internet connection isn’t fast enough. Yet I have no trouble with Netflix and Amazon, using the Roku and the BluRay player.
That seems really odd…while you would need fast internet to watch “live” on-demand stuff, the Genie basically downloads the programs and adds them to the list. Even if you have slower internet, you should be able to watch the program after it downloads. I can’t remember what the minimum internet requirements are though.
I had Dish for just over a year, switched to DTV about 2 years ago and have never looked back.
Dish advertises a lower price and for its programming that is “slightly” true. However if you plan more than one room being connected that savings evaporates quickly. Dish charges much more per unit for equipment and I just generally like the hardware better on DTV.
I have the choice package which is just under top tier and i network five separate rooms with 2 DVRs and 3 receivers. Total cost is 76 per month.
I have considered and eventually plan to drop any sat/cab and go full internet but right now the tech for me is just not quite there… but soon
The minimum must be more than what I have. When I stream Netflix, it tells me the speed is 7 mbps, and a 2 hour movie downloads in less than a minute. When I tried to download something from On Demand, it was still downloading the next day.
It’s not a big deal – there’s still plenty of programming without On Demand.
I told Comcast to piss off a couple months ago after they tried billing me for PPV movies we didn’t order. Their customer service is completely wretched. We switched to Dish for TV, and Clear 4G wireless for internet. D
Dish is pretty cool, the only downside was we had to ditch our beloved TiVos, although the Hopper is pretty good. I don’t like that the second TV in my office steals one of the tuners off the Hopper in the living room, where the missus is DVRing like a crazy person. I love the fact that EVERY prime time program on all the major networks gets recorded, all on 1 tuner. That gives a lot of flexibility for the other tuners.
Dish on-demand uses my internet connection, which isn’t great in my case. I’m getting anywhere between 3-8 Mbps generally with Clear, with an occasional 10-12. Therefore, on-demand video quality is not terribly impressive, although the broadcast video quality is quite good, maybe even better than Comcast, which was dithered all to hell and back.
