I hope you don’t feel insulted if I direct a ping your way. You seem to be very well informed on almost every subject, so maybe you can give me some advice here?
I have less than 8 month to go on my Directtv contract and I will be switching back to Dish. I switched when Dish was in contract dispute with the Fox channels and I kick my own butt everytime I turn the set on.
I have the full blown everything Pak and they are just now getting some of the channels in HD that Dish offered. They don’t carry the local channels in HD in my area (Dish did) and even told me that they were not available. If you are able to receive HD over the air you cannot hook it directly into non primary DirectTV equipment. It can only be hooked in to the Whole Home DVR using a box that is the size of a friggin DVD player.
Their DVR funtionality sucks compared to DISH, their remote controls have a built in 3 second delay before anything happens, often causing you change the channel or something else because of this delay and then they have this stupid “bong” that you hear if it is something that the receiver can’t do. Their channel guide sucks too. Say you want to watch ESPN on Direct channel 206. You punch in 205 by mistake. After the delay,you hear the bong, it will say channel unavailable. On Dish, it will change to the nearest channel that is available or in this case it will either go to 206 or 204.
On non primary receivers you cannot set a future show to record but you can set a an autotune. On the main Whole Home DVR you can set shows to record but you cannot set an autotune.
With Dish you can get 4 independent DVRs or in my case 2 single DVRs and one 2 dual tuner DVR. With the over the air connection directly inot each unit which would display on the guide. Also with the dual tuner connected to the over the air channels you could record 3 (2 Dish channels and one over the air) shows at one time, altough you had to be watching one of them. By plugging in the over the air your actual dish receiver acts as another antenna and will pull in additional channels...
IWas told on the phone that they would disconnect and ship back all of my Dish equipment which was a lie, they lied about carrying more HD then Dish, Not only did they lie about my local channels they then argued with me that they were not available in HD even though I was watching them (conected directly to my set)! Thier customer service sucks.
DirectTV Sucks!
I might be the only one here to say it, but do without it. There isn’t much worth watching on TV anyway. I have not had outside TV in the house for over 5 years. Haven’t really missed it. Be brave, cut the cord.
we dumped direct tv after 5 years, they refused to ‘move with us’ even though they advertise doing so, when we canceled they continued to bill us because we didn’t go through the ‘proper chanels’, then they billed every credit card ever used for online bill pay to try to recoup the difference. I had friends and family that paid online as gifts to us and they got billed years later. their dish is now a miniature bird bath near the back pond. Dish network had originally told us that every level adds to the basic package.