Satellite TV?

BobbyFord

BobbyFord

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Who is your satellite provider and how would you rate them on quality, customer service, pricing, value, etc.?
I'm getting brutalized by Time Warner Cable. $56 a month for a very limited channel lineup. My bill keeps going up and they keep removing channels from my lineup as a "restructuring". I don't have any premium channels, no SpeedTV, no ESPN Classic, no AMC, etc. I've "lost" 6-8 channels and my bill has increased about 20% from what I used to pay.
DirectTV? DishNetwork? I want to get satellite but I don't want to get into a worse situation.
The City Attorney recently filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit here in L.A. against Time Warner Cable and it's affiliates for unlawful and unfair business practices (among other allegations).
 
I got Dish. I think its the best package they have. Dont know about the movie package. Dad picked that part out. I have the DVR and i love it. I dont really know about support. We already had the Dish hooked up from a few years ago, so they really just gave us new boxs. and the person that hooked it up was someone that we have known for years and years. All-in-all i like it.
 
I have DirecTV and love it. However, I have a much older package that is no longer offered.

I have about 397 channels(including all of HBO and STARZ movie channels) for which I pay about $90 a month(that includes taxes and the charges for 2 extra receivers). I do NOT have HD.
 
I had Dish for 2 months. Within that time we had the signal go out 15 times.
I paid the 200dollar fee to cancel and went back to cable.

Hope you have better luck.
 
Directv. Picture is great, but it goes out everytime it storms just about.

The place I'm moving in to only has Comcast Basic Cable though.

Oh well.
 
BobbyFord said:
Who is your satellite provider and how would you rate them on quality, customer service, pricing, value, etc.?
I'm getting brutalized by Time Warner Cable. $56 a month for a very limited channel lineup. My bill keeps going up and they keep removing channels from my lineup as a "restructuring". I don't have any premium channels, no SpeedTV, no ESPN Classic, no AMC, etc. I've "lost" 6-8 channels and my bill has increased about 20% from what I used to pay.
DirectTV? DishNetwork? I want to get satellite but I don't want to get into a worse situation.
The City Attorney recently filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit here in L.A. against Time Warner Cable and it's affiliates for unlawful and unfair business practices (among other allegations).
Click to expand...
$56/month for basic cable?
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That's a good deal man. :cool:
 
i have directv have had it since 1998, my package is 68.00 a month same as TRL but guess i have a little beter rate don't ask why cause i don't know.

really good picture and have never had a problem with it
 
I have had Dish Network for about 5 years.. Love it!! My neighbor has mediacom cable and her Tv isnt nearly clear as mine is. She still gets the ghosts and fuzzy lines. My only draw back with dish is sometimes when we get alot of snow it goes out until I go out and wipe it all off :). I payed $200 for the whole set up and $56 a month.
 
Well let's start with I've never had Dish but I do hear good things about them. When we lived in the country cable wasn't available so we went from a 10 ft sat dish to PrimeStar to DirecTV. I actually took the PrimeStar dish and attached the feed horns from DirecTV to it and I got a 98-99 signal. We almost never lost the picture. The PrimeStar dish has a bigger footprint so it was able to capture more of the signal. I have a friend who attached the DirecTV feed horns to a 5 foot dish. Now that's a clear pic.
But, alas we moved to the city and where I'm at now I don't have a clear view of the SSW sky so I can't have DTV. We have gone with Time Warner Cable and have been pretty much satisfied. Their HD-DVR cable boxes are the psuk but I don't have any problems with their customer service. Which I understand is very rare. But, then since my wife is confined to the home and the TV is her main source of contact with the outside world we have everything. (Funny story, I'm on the phone with TWC placing the order and she asks which package I wanted. I told her that except for the pron channels I wanted everything. She actually started going thru the differences in the various packages. I finally stopped her and asked what part of everything she didn't understand. We also have RR and digital phone thru them. Needless to say our bill is $Texas).
But my experiences are that if you treat CS like their human you'll usually get better treatment than if you like to complain over every little thing and use language your grandmother wouldn't approve of.
But, then maybe that's just me.
 
I have DirectTV and I have a lot of problems with it. I have a HD DVR and there is a problem they will admit to with the DVR just freezing up when you are watching something recorded. I have to reset the receiver, which takes about 10-15 minutes to fix it. They said they could replace the receiver, but I would very likely have the same thing happen. They can't seem to fix the problem. If you have HD, DirectTV has a lot more HD channels than DishNetwork and a whole lot more than cable does. That being said, I don't know if Dish has the same kind of problems with the receiver/DVR that DirectTV has. I also lose my signal in storms or even heavy rain quite a bit. But then, we have had some brutal storms lately.

I hope this helps.
 
Wow, I pay the same price to Time Warner for digital and I get all of those channels you say you don't. Even when we had just regular cable on all TVs, we got around 70 channels, but no SPEED or ESPN Classic, etc. We do get ESPN and ESPN2. We only have the digital box on the main TV and the others have the regular line-up. We just got the digital a year ago since they offered us a deal to upgrade to digital for .25 cents/mo for life. We also got a free year of SHOWTIME. It just ran out and I got a bill for a partial month which was $6 and change. Not sure if we'll be keeping that or not.

Their service has gotten much better than it used to be around here. It depends on how bad an outage is, for instance if there's a big storm and a lot of areas lose it. If it's a small area, we usually have it back within hours.
 
I was a DirecTV customer from 1999 to Sept. of 2003. They had great customer service, great picture quality, and great pricing. We went to cable when we got out first HDTV and felt gouged the whole time.

We went back to DirecTV about 6 weeks ago. Customer service is good, not as great as it once was, but still better than Comcast. Picture quality is great, excellent selection of HD channels. I finally have my SpeedTV HD. My biggest complaint is the signal goes out too often during a storm. My father-in-law does not have the same problem, at least that's what he claims. The next time mine goes out, I'm going to call him. It could be the dish could be aimed more exact. But it's like anything else: there are pros and cons to everything.

I will add that DirecTV has some good prices on packages for one year if you sign up for two years.
 
I have Dish Network and have the middle package (120 channels I believe) with a DVR and it costs me less than $60. It includes Speed and all ESPN channels. Haven't had too much problem with it even in bad weather.
 
Funny thing, I just got a DirecTV envelope in the mail today with some introductory offer packages. I think I'll give 'em a call and see what they have to offer :D
 
We have direct HD. 3 boxes, one being the DLP, rarely do we get a washout. Don't know what we pay, but the HD is only 10 more a month. We're on an intermediate plan (I think premium choice plus or soemthing)
 
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