I have DirecTV. Finished my subscription commitment and am moving into a new house. Need a new Satellite TV and internet provider .. though Comcast is the local monopoly for ISP.

Dish or DirecTV ?

Dish is cheaper ... seems to be more user-friendly , plus they have this HD free for life program atm. PLUS, they have apps etc that allow you to stream to android or iPhone equipment any tv that is being broadcast .. DirecTV does not. BBC in HD ! Very interested in that for Top Gear and the wife for Dr. Who.

DirecTV has some more channels, but their dman DVR's are horrible .. slow and unresponsive. Some of the channels I would miss out on .. Hallmark, MSNBC .. a couple I would not miss.


Please share thoughts, comments, and personal experiences, stories ....

I've had Direct TV before and I currently have Dish and I personally prefer Direct TV.

Mainly because of alot of things that Dish does irritates me, like splitting their programming packages too much. This is how they have it setup, America's top 40 channels then top 60, top 80, top 100 etc. Making you pay more money for channels you should already have. Last I remember, channels like Cartoon Network, Discovery Channel, FX, USA, TNT came in the basic package for Direct TV, but with Dish you have to pay extra for all of those.

Also little things like how Dish network sorts their channels in their on-screen guide is a complete mess while Direct TV has them better grouped together. Also, after a while Dish remotes wear out and barely work, you'll have to press the remote to your face or arm or whatever to change the damn channel.

I don't know about everyone else's experience with Dish, but mine hasn't been the greatest.

I've heard from friends that the DirecTV menus are just much more intuitive than Dish. It's like Dish's menus/DVR was designed by monkeys on good tech and DirecTV was done by pros, but on slow sluggish hardware.

OK .. the biggest difference has been discovered.

DishTV does NOT have local broadcast channels .. ie no ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, PBS, etc ... big negative (could be replaced via hulu plus somewhat).

I have had Direct for 4 yrs or so and have nothing bad to say. I've called customer service a few times and got through very quick with no hassles and problem solved in less than 5mins. Try that with comcast.
The only option for internet though.

Dish DOES have local channels, though it costs between 5-10$ for them. Well at least they did last year, I think the hitch was that you had to have a package also. Packages are from $25-50(250 ch's) I see on the site.

http://www.dishnetwork.com/compare/ (Comparison between the two, I guess DirectTV got a D+ rating from the Better Business Bureau)

http://www.dishnetwork.com/redirects/pr ... fault.aspx (This is one of the reason's I'd like to get Dish again, the mobile sling that you can hook to Laptop is awesome! I have Netflix, Hulu already also.)

The downside is some of this is promotional for first timers, so I hope it doesn't exclude me... Also I am not sure if they provide you a satellite with a contract or not anymore. One last thing Direct doesn't have is the capability to DVR and watch another channel, and they charge 6$ for each additional receiver in each room +buying each Receiver. I guess the new Receivers can allow multiple TV's on different channels? I will be probably hooking it up tomorrow so if you haven't by then and need anymore info hit me up Fubar.

I've never had Dish so I have no input there, but I am out of contract with DirecTV. I called them last week and told them "I don't want to cancel but Dish is much cheaper...anything you can do for me?"

They gave me $20 off for 6 months plus another $5 off for 6 months on my nearly-worthless Showtime package. Best thing is this didn't require a contract reup, I'm still out of contract.

I've had direcTV for years and have no complaints. I second what someone mentioned about he menus though. a few friends have Dish, and the menus seem faster, but totally a pain to navigate.

I can dvr 1 channel while watching another, so not sure what fearfax meant by that.

all that said, I have a friend that dropped all of it and only uses hulu and netflix and claims to be very happy with the results. in fact, she said it was so much cheaper that she was able to buy a huge new TV with all of that integrated in for less than the cost of cable/sat for a year (even paying extra for some series on hulu).

once I get some time to look into it, I am most likely going to go that route myself.

I have had dish for about 15 years. I now have it in four rooms using two boxes to serve those rooms. If you want HD in every room, you will need one box per room. For a long time I didn't use the local channel package because I hooked up my over air antenna to the box and just switched over with the remote to watch locals. I now pay the extra 5 bucks for locals to make it easier for the extra rooms.

I have been interested in streaming channels from the internet instead of using dish or cable. The only problem is that my wife is almost deaf and closed captioning over the internet is almost non existant.

I have one of the first DVR's, it isn't able to DVR 1 channel while watching another. Also I use Netflix to Stream and rent 3 videos at a time. I love it, Iwas able to get rid of all movie channels on Dish. Able to rent 3 videos at a time and return them whenever.. It has saved me a lot. Plus it has a lot of new movies & tv shows that you can get on Dish without any commercials! I would suggest the service everyone, it's very slick! I want to try Blockbuster's streaming because I think they will have a lot more current movies.