Just bought a house last week and am going through setting everything up. Just curious what you guys use as a television provider. Is dish worth it compared to cable? How much do you pay a month? The house already has a satellite dish on the roof but can any provider be hooked up to it? TIA.
Dish and Direct have their own equipment and they are not compatible. If ya want Sat. TeeVee then call em both and see which one offers you the best deal I have Direct and kinda like it But am thinkin about switching to Dish because they are offering such a good deal for New customers right now and Direct aint offering me nuthin. They did say that if I talked to Dish to call them and let them see if they can match it . I said NO if I go to the trouble to talk to them . Ill just switch if and when they offer me a better deal .
Nothing stopping you from checking on all three service providers. Compare channel availability and cost. If you can get your hands on a channel line-up from each provider, that'll help a ton as you can look at exactly what each dollar will give you. Identify the channels you'll watch regularly, occasionally, and rarely, use that information to gather an idea of what you'll want in a package of channels, and then compare the three across the packages you've put together. Odds are with a little homework, you'll see exactly which service provider is the best.
Directv is the most up to date. They are all 2000 channels of **** on the tv to choose from but it is the best.
we switched from dish to suddenlink a couple of months ago because the internet is really good. pros for cable: never lose signal. in a storm, which comes in handy this time of year, and ordering on demand programs takes 2 seconds, dont have to have a phone line hooked up to it. cons for cable: dvr sucks compared to dish, hd isnt as good, have to have a receiver in every room.
FIOS has such limited availability it isn't really isn't an option for most. There are only a few of the suburbs around Austin that have it. AT&T U-Verse is more common in these parts as the cable/sat alternative, I have known some who have had no problems and love it and others who could never get it to work right and hated it. Again though, if you are out of the major metros none are an option for you. I have had Directv for 11 years and wouldn't change.
I did the research and Dish worked best for me. Thanks for the suggestions everybody. $15 off a month for the first year, free HD, two dvrs was the best I found.
Verizon just finally opened up shop in Norman (after they're purchase of US Cellular was finalized), I'm hoping FIOS will be entering Oklahoma City soon. But I was under the impression that FIOS is only being installed in newer neighborhoods. So I'm out of luck now since I live on campus (Boyd & Elm), and can't even get U-Verse here yet. Sat TV is tempting, but I'll be waiting until I put a new roof on the house, my parents dish as their house got broken off by the roofing crew, just a hassle, and paranoid it would happen again. That said, Cox did seem expensive, but after comparing with friends who live in DFW, Houston, and Denver, what I have with Cox is cheaper. And to answer the Overall Thread Question, I'm partial to cable now that I have everything set up properly, it took a BS installation fee, another two BS fees and having two amps put it in, but I have crystal clear HD in all those rooms now and I really like how many HD channels are offered. I'm not sure if any other cable providers have expanded as quickly as Cox did in the last two years (per DSLReports). But if you can live with the cost, and need internet, I'd recommend cable. One less bill is always nicer in my opinion.
Look at buying your boxes separately if possible, you can usually find them on Amazon depending on your provider and can save some money. This is as opposed to paying the monthly fee for the box for 24 months.
I (my parents) have cox Digital Cable with 4 HDTVs and we love it, we have 2 DVRs, one in the living room and one for me (resident nerd) and i have free HD and i havnt called customer service for anything and we did have a guy come out and fix the living room unit because it was making a weird picture sometimes and the guy made one little adjustment and its been great ever since. Cox is amazing.
How is the HD not as good? And since when do you have to have a receiver in every room for cable signal? Every plant I'm familiar with still sends 6 MHz down the pipe, receivable by standard analog tuners.
If he has SuddenLink (which from the clipped part of the post above he does) they require a box to receive HD channels if it is like the setup in Monahans. We have considered moving one of our HDTV's to my father-in-laws house (before our house was broken into again) and he would have to add a box with the requisite fee.
Supposedly the satellite companies send 1080p signal down as opposed to either 720p or 1080i from the cable companies. Some people also complain that local cable companies tend to highly compress their HD signals.
Someone already mentioned it, but we've gone to sports bars with directv only to see every TV out of order during a storm. Derp. We have used Cox since moving to Tulsa. It costs too much, but it's TV.
