Satellite TV

[Diggin It]

So here is my request:

For anyone with Dish what have been your experiences? Both good and bad.

For anyone with Dish that changed to Direct TV. What caused you to move/abandon Dish TV and why?

High rates. Poor, argumentative 'customer service'. Horrible company profile ... harrased a disabled employee for example. Repetitive programming. Limited choice of companies and formats. No Learning on The Learning Channel. No Arts or Entertainment on A&E. Nonsense on The Weather Channel. Proliferation of 'reality' shows.

I've had DISH for over ten years. No problems AND no other way to receive TV. It's either satellite TV or listen to the radio.

Radio is worse than TV as far as commercials. Turned it ALL off years ago. No regrets. I record my own music now from web sources or LPs I've digitized. My playlists run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and I rarely hear the same track more than once a month. No talk shows. No ads.

NO TV at all for close to ten years now. Don't miss it a bit.

I have Dish for $60/month and plenty of channels.

All owned and operated by the same couple of companies.

 

[Spike56]

Same here - DISH. DirecTV, owned by AT&T .... fired them and regret ever signing up with them. Have AT&T cell phone coverage - wish I did not ! My experiences with ATT have been poor to say the least. They constantly change prices and will take you for every cent they can.
My DISH satellite saves me about $30-$40 / month and I am not missing any channels I care about. So far (1 year) so good.

 

[techman]

We had dish for many years. They would try to raise prices every few years and it took several phone calls with threats to cancel to keep the old price, or just increase it a bit. Finally an increase came that they would not negotiate and it crossed our rubicon of $100/month, so we cancelled. We started streaming our TV and we get all we want (and more) for $ 65 a month. Looking back we should have made the change earlier. We have a number of friends that have also gone streaming vs satellite and cable. Some were over $150 a month for directv. All are happy streaming and saving money.

paul

 

[Oaktree]

High rates. Poor, argumentative 'customer service'. Horrible company profile ... harrased a disabled employee for example. Repetitive programming. Limited choice of companies and formats. No Learning on The Learning Channel. No Arts or Entertainment on A&E. Nonsense on The Weather Channel. Proliferation of 'reality' shows.

NO TV at all for close to ten years now. Don't miss it a bit.

TV programming was dumb 50 years ago too. The term "idiot box" has been around a long time, when did Newton Minnow declare TV a "vast wasteland", late 50s/early 1960s?
That having been said, even though we're not big tv watchers, it's something to do winter evenings. Can only spend so much time on TBN. Even some of the "reality" shows aren't too bad...kinda like Storage Wars and the Amazing Race, maybe a couple others.

We considered going to one of the satellite services back in '08 when we lost all OTA due to the digital conversion, never got around to it, then Time-Warner cable came down our road in '12 so we just went with that.
Thing I don't like about either of the satellite services is they give you an introductory rate good for one year, but make you sign a 2 year contract. Selection of "local" channels wasn't as good as TWC gave us either.

Spent the last 4.5 months working with ATT to get 2600’ of fiber to house. Now great internet and use DTV streaming. Save $80/mo and so much better. So long dish.

Telecoms have gotten billion$ from our taxpayer $$ to bring high speed internet to rural areas so keep checking. If you have a landline phone should be able to get fiber soon.

Nice if you can get it. Thing is, there's no ROI for wiring a large part of rural America. Fiber is expensive, and you need a certain subscriber density to make it worthwhile, even with government money.
Even where we are, both the telco and TWC ran fiber down our road, but the actual distribution is copper, not sure why. I asked the service tech one time when he was working on a pole in front of my house and got a vague answer.

 

[reb]

We had Dish for 20+ years. The receiver crapped out and we decided to drop it. Our town has fiber internet so we went for streaming. So far it works well and we ended up paying less than half what Dish cost.

 

[bigtiller]

We bought our first DVR in 98 from a TV retail store and signed up with DirecTV for the programing. We still have DirecTV but are on our 3rd DVR. They mailed us out 2nd & 3rd boxes. I think it is a good marketing plan to do that.

We have the opportunity to go with fiber optic but haven't made the switch yet.

 

[Sawyer Rob]

I've had Direct for about 10 years now, for the most part, they have been pretty good. I've never had a complaint big enough to make me want to change to anything else.

SR

 

[deserteagle71]

Radio is worse than TV as far as commercials. Turned it ALL off years ago. No regrets. I record my own music now from web sources or LPs I've digitized. My playlists run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and I rarely hear the same track more than once a month. No talk shows. No ads.

^ This is me also. Except that I also had a huge music library on reel to reel and cassette tapes in addition to the vinyl. Now all my music is stored on flash drives that I can plug in to my stereo at home or any of my vehicles.

 

[kcflhrc]

I switched from Direct TV to Dish about 3 years ago. The only reason I switched was pricing. Direct TV wants to suck you in with a 24 month contract and promotional pricing for only 12 months of that contract then they give you the bone on months 13 thru 24. Dish is a 12 month contract with pricing locked for that entire 12 months then of course you have to renegotiate which is a PIA.

 

[Oaktree]

^ This is me also. Except that I also had a huge music library on reel to reel and cassette tapes in addition to the vinyl. Now all my music is stored on flash drives that I can plug in to my stereo at home or any of my vehicles.

Yeah, same here. I do still listen to the radio for those times I want to hear new music and/or stuff I don't already have.