Hey Greg,
I had Direct TV and it sucked. I have Dish now and would recommend it over Direct TV in a heartbeat. I inherited Direct TV when Primestar was bought out by them. Primestar was great but Direct TV pretty much sucked ass. The only positive thing with Direct TV is that rain and/or wind never seemed to effect it. It can happen from time to time with Dish. I've never had it go out for long periods with Dish but I have had it go out for 10-20 second periods during a good storm. I had a problem with a peacock getting up there and messing with things once too.(long story) Everything else with Direct TV was negative. The first problem was that they didn't have very many channels. In fact they had less then regular cable. I don't know if that's changed since I had it or not. They sent me a deal in the mail a few months back trying to get me to sign back up again. I don't remember now how their offer compared to when I had it last but I wasn't impressed and tossed the thing in the trash so I don't think it's changed much. Another thing that sucks with them is that you have to hook your phone to the cable box.(Something you need to order pay for view but they make you do it to make sure you don't take the box to your neighbors house) Hooking the phone up isn't a big deal if you have a phone jack next to your TV but if not you'll have to run a cable along the floor from the jack to the box. Or buy a transmitter deal from them that plugs into your phone jack. $100 each if I remember right. I needed 2. They were trying to force me to hook my phone up for them and they wanted me to pay for the stupid things. I ended up telling them to get ****ed! Another problem was that the channel number on the screen was tiny. I have a 36 inch screen and my couch was maybe 12 ft from the TV and I couldn't ever tell what friggin' station I was on. Another thing that sucked is that the preview guide channel scrolled down the screen by itself. If you missed what was on a station you had to wait for the stupid thing to cycle through again and try to catch it the next time around. Dish is way better. You don't have to hook up your phone if you don't want, the channel numbers are easy to read and you control the preview channel. You can even watch one channel and surf through the other channels at the same time. Dish had a problem with showing certain sporting events in the past but have settled that now. They would sometimes blackout games that were in my local area which sucked. Not anymore though. In fact, I see an extra 10 or so Gaints games a year that other cable companies don’t show because of the deal Dish worked out. They have alternative program channels that they used to use to show programming on when games were blacked out. Now they will sometimes use those channels to show games that aren’t shown in your local area. For instance, Fox Sports Bay Area shows mostly Gaints games with a handful of A’s games thrown in. Some nights the A’s and the Gaints will both have a game with a 7pm start time but the A’s game will be scheduled to air on FSBA with the Gaints game only being on radio. When this happens they will often times show the Gaints on one of the Fox alternative channels.
One last thing with Dish is that they offer your local channels too. That way if you want to watch the local news or something you don’t have to turn off the cable box and flip over to TV. That was huge for me because 2 of our local channels were fuzzy because I’m out on the edge of town. Dish baby!
Favoured: 0
