Ron, had no idea cable used such arrogant manipulations. I'm wondering if the dish programming shows problems caused by CABLE as cable does with the dish! Of course over the years we've seen cable ads showing dishes wiped out by inclement weather and it looked reasonable. With something sitting on a roof, porch, etc. it does seem vulnerable. Apparently if the dish had those problems, they've been overcome. The replies in this thread are evidence of this and we have no one else to ask about this. Husband said friends from New Jersey all love the dish over cable in every way but I can't go by what they say. We needed objective opinions and we're grateful to have them. Thanks for your reply. Sherry
Mikepier, you're doing great for having cable. We pay 139 monthly just for cable on 5 tv sets with 5 movie channels -- no digital. Local phone is about
60 monthly and ATT for long distance ends up about 16 monthly. I don't have the AOL figure as another household memeber handles that but it's in the 20's monthly. So we're waaaayyy above what you pay. Is everything else cheaper there? hehe! We have comcast here (formerly Suburban Cable). I assume also you're happy with the service. Thanks for your reply. Sherry
Tom, well we have a "jerrold box" for each our 5 TV sets. Don't know if that's the counterpart to the receiver you speak of. Dish still sounds better than cable from the replies so far. We'll check out offers. Thanks for your reply. Sherry
Brikp, what would be missing without a DVR receiver? As you can see I'm totally ignorant regarding dish viewing. Do you have to ask for particular models? Are some better than others? I put dishdepot.com into my favorites for now. More research to do. Thanks for your reply. Sherry
Phisherman, we don't yet have an HDTV set. We have ordinary ones as we're not into TV features that much. We're interested in content and number of channels available because of 3 people with diverse TV interests. We're going to look over the offerings as well as cost and service. Hope we don't have a conflict because of differences within the household. :/ Thanks for your reply. Sherry
trader4, We're happy with AOL, just because of instant messaging with friends who have it and because of it's own forums and member contact/info accessibility. Just a matter of offerings, quality, service, cost, etc. If we can get better with dish than we get with cable, we'll switch. It's beginning to sound like we may have to lose some of the channels we've enjoyed. We'll find out what we can get for how much. Thanks for your reply. Sherry
Jay, looks like your experience shows how bad weather can affect the dish, which is one of our concerns. We have a 2-story (front to back) split and neighbors have large trees although we don't. We also seem to be in some sort of wind gust plane here. Everyone's leaves, everyone's everything seems to end up on our property, so we could be very vulnerable. I don't expect a dish company to tell us our location would be problematic. Appreciate the details about your location with the dish. Location may be very important with this. Also we don't know if cable would have to remove their wires and dish install theirs. We expect also to move in 6 mos. so we don't know if it's worth it. One offer we read about said "no contract" so we wouldn't be stuck for a year or any amount of time beyond I suppose a month. We have a lot of investigating to do before we put in the energy for this kind of change. Thanks for your reply. Sherry
Paul, guess what's to our southwest?????!!! Next door neighbor's HUGE sycamore tree! Leaves are up to 14" across and many end up in our yard due to mysterious wind gusts isolated on our property. Maybe this will all be moot for now as we're moving in about 6 months. We have comcast and doubt we could get a deal like yours. Where are you from, BTW? We tried to get digital on one TV set, a very basic Sylvania VCR combo and they couldn't connect digital to it. We have a newer TV now but the others are all older and maybe none are compatible with digital. So we do have many questions for the dish companies. Thanks for your reply. Sherry
Dan, basic cable here is probably a little more than your cost but our issue is
3 viewers with diverse TV viewing interests. I don't care about Court TV, for example, but mom would miss not having it. Also she loves the home decorating shows and my husband watches dopey shows like "favorite TV bloopers" which mom and I would never watch. :) Necessary -- large package to satisfy all of us. :) Thanks for your reply. Sherry
Hi, I am on digital cable TV/Internet combo. I know dish is affected by weather conditions. Some does not provide local programming. I have over 400 channels of HD digital video, music, pay per view, etc. Tony
The only thing cable is good for is internet. I'll never pay their exorbitant fees again for TV. Thank god my company is paying for my internet, or I probably wouldn't use them.
People talk about "rain fade" during rainstorms and satellite dishes. In New England, I've never had this problem. 5+ years of satellite. I've never had a snow problem either. I have, however, had rain fade with cable TV. In my old house, me and my entire neighborhood would get static on the screen in varying severity depending on how much rain was falling. I lived there for 4 years and it never improved. Most of us called during every rain storm, and quite often we were told "that's normal"!!! We all know that's BS, but this is the customer service I had.
Price was the main reason I decided to try satellite. After I got it, I knew I'd never have cable TV again. Price is still an easy $10 cheaper than cable in my area and I get more channels with far better quality.
Keep in mind that if you have a large screen TV, digital cable (in many areas) is so over compressed because of all the services they are pushing down the same cable, that the picture looks very pixelated (like a video clip on your computer).
Pixelating (or artifacting) on satellite services is far less noticeable. On both Dish Network and DirecTV, you'll find that the local channels for your area are generally the worst quality (but still far better than anything digital cable has). Next in quality are the mainstream channels that all providers offer (comedy, food, court, espn, nik, etc.). These are great quality and you'd be hard pressed to complain. Next in quality are the premium channels (HBO, Cimemax, etc). And the best quality is reserved for PPV. These rival DVD's.
Now, to compare quality between Dish and DirecTV, I've found Dish to be lower in quality. There was a time that Dish's quality was so bad, it made cable look good! They've since launched another satellite to help bandwidth and their quality has improved quite a bit. But side by side, DirecTV still has a better quality picture all around. Keep in mind this is on large screen sets and anything under 50" you'll probably never notice the difference.
Dish and DirecTV offer a little different base packages and depending on what you want, one may be a better deal than the other. You'll have to shop them.
For both, you can usually get free equipment if you are a first time subscriber. Especially if you call and tell them you're thinking of getting cable, but want to know why satellite is better - they'll do whatever it takes to sign you up!!
We get "local channels" (i.e., the local outlets of the major networks) via DirecTV, and they broadcast the storm warnings. What we don't get are the truly local channels such as public access and broadcasts of city council and school board meetings.
We've lost our signal twice in the year we've had DirecTV, but only during torrential rain, not during normal rainfall. But the cable companies are receiving their signals from satellites too, so sometimes the signal they receive (and pass on to you) will deteriorate too; the only difference is that their dishes are bigger.
With any kind of satellite system, your signal quality will depend on how well your dish can "see" the satellite, so nearby trees and tall buildings need to be taken into consideration.
Check all the available services and packages and figure out which gives you the channels you want for the most affordable price.
Perce
On 12/09/04 11:17 pm PaNjDeFemale tossed the following ingredients into the ever-growing pot of cybersoup:
Without a DVR receiver you lose the ability to record now and play back later *with the same picture quality*. You could still record to a VCR, but you won't see the same quality on playback.
We have a combo DirecTV receiver and TiVo PVR/DVR that offers features ike "Season Pass" that will automatically record all episodes of a particular program (with or without repeats) without us having to worry about scheduling each episode individually and worrying whether it's on at a different time or whether it's a 2-hour episode instead of the usual 1-hour one.
Perce
On 12/09/04 11:57 pm PaNjDeFemale tossed the following ingredients into the ever-growing pot of cybersoup:
Last time when I switched from cable to DirecTV, the installer didn't remove the existing wiring. He simply ran new wire using a different route. This was a good thing because local squirrels like to bite the wire of the cable service that was put in a way that squirrels have easy access to the cable.
Probably not. You will lose a vacation day just to sit in your house waiting for the installer to show up.
You get the warnings the local channels broadcast, you would get them on an antenna too. Our cable breaks in on whatever channel you are on and goes to the weather channel so they can tell you to run and hide because it is raining outside. If thet ran a banner at the bottem of the screen it would be ok, but they interupt what ever show you are watching and tune to the weather channel, you can not turn back to your movie, sports, what ever, they run the show. You might be watching a pay per view movie and they will interupt the show! It ticks me off! Greg
On 12/10/2004 2:16 PM US(ET), Greg O took fingers to keys, and typed the following:
That's a 'feature' of your particular cable company and perhaps your local govt. The local govt. has a say in what, and how, cable will be distributed ( I want to say 'broadcast', but that's not the proper terminology with cable). Where I live, with Time-Warner cable, if there is a weather alert, they have the scrolling banner on the bottom of the screen, *except* on any premium channels.
I switched to DirecTV since it had become cheaper than cable. (price had gone up steadily since Comcast took over the local co-op) I love the fact that I now have a dual-tuner Tivo instead of a single-tuner standalone one. I like that I get Comedy Central on East Coast time, even though I'm on the West Coast. I don't like that I have to plug the Tivo into the phone (the standalone one I had before can use a network connection)
Is the $50 you mention the installation fee or the monthly cost? If it's the installation fee, shop around. You can get free installation for up to 4 rooms, at
And, I should add, our combo DirecTV receiver and TiVo PVR/DVR has dual tuners, so we can record two different program simultaneously, and even watch a pre-recorded program at the same time as these other two are being recorded.
Someone else had complained about not being able to use the picture-in-picture feature with satellite systems, but since this thing has twin tuners I assume that we could also get PIP if our TV had that feature.
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