TV comes back after 605 days |
My wife only asked for one thing on Valentine’s Day: TV. I spent a little too much time on V-Day in the negotiation phase with the three primary TV providers: DirecTV, the satellite service who we’d been with years ago and enjoyed, Comcast cable who provides our internet and DishNetwork. The picture below gives up which one we went with and where I’ve been the last few days.
As far as pricing goes, all three with the programming we wanted were about the same. With Dish we could get the most channels in HD (1080i) through their HD Ultra plan including HDNet and HDNet movies, which I’ve been curious to check out. My wife wanted Showtime, which all three offered. Only cable offered Showtime On Demand which we were interested in.
I think what put Dish over the top was that we hadn’t been customers with them before and they agreed to waive the 24 month contract provision (I hate contracts!). They also were willing to come out the next day and complete the installation and setup. With the impending three day weekend, this scored additional points. And true to their word, their friendly and helpful technician was at our door the next day nearly an hour earlier than the range of times they said he’d show up (noon-5). Nice.
We received their newest model HD DVR which allows for up to 350 hours of standard programming or 50 hours in HD.
Two not better than one dish
Something I did not like about the Dish install experience was the placement of not one, but two satellite dishes on our roof. The salesman never said we’d have to have two dishes or that this might even be a possibility. Although the installation was professional, it looks a bit cheesy on the corner of the front of our house. Almost like we are advertising to the neighborhood: hey look, we don’t have just one satellite, we have two, neener, neener.
Wrong programming package and pricing
Dish also screwed up the programming order and pricing they promised. The salesman promised us $74.99/month with no contract and fees, Showtime, local channels (yes, you have to pay more for those with satellite), HD DVR receiver, an additional standard receiver, the America 100 package and HD Ultra ($20/mo). Our first bill was supposed to be $104.99 on March 4. When I registered online with our account number I saw a bill over $200 and that they’d already charged us $49.99. They also didn’t list Showtime.
Off to customer support to call them while the install guy continued to work outside. We got it straightened out but I had to eat half the $49.99 "no contract" charge, despite the salesman assurance that we would not be charged anything until March 4. I was tempted to tell him to pack up his equipment and take the two dishes back with him, but decided to let this one go.
I removed the no TV counter from the home page since it no longer applies. Now tell me, friendly readers, what is all this great live TV programming we’ve been missing? What are your favorite shows? Our DVR is waiting to be programmed.
Update 11:50am PST: After posting this, I’ve received some questions elsewhere about why we went 605 days without it? I didn’t link to the original post when we dumped TV and reviewed Vongo, or the follow-up post after one year where we still didn’t have it. Here are both those posts so you can go back through the history:
June 20, 2007: No TV for our family of five for 1 year and counting
January 15, 2006: Review: Bye bye TV, hello Vongo
I was also asked why we went back after being away for so long? We got a month to month contract. We can be back for a couple months and leave again if the value isn’t there. Although it was my wife that was the primary reason we went back, I don’t think she wants to pay $75/month for something we don’t use enough. Time will tell on this one.
While we have TV again, I’d like to see all there is to offer and see if the value is there these days. With the writer’s strike over and the Mariners season about to kick off, I’m not complaining that we have TV again. None of this is to say we have it for a few months and then get rid of it again though.
3:41pm PST: Andrew asked in the comments below what the Dish satellite shape was like:
Did this post make you go hmm?
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I’m sure this was on tv when you last had tv, but one of my big faves is CSI las vegas. I’ve also become quite fond of Jericho on CBS. Of course, we don’t get CBS, so I have to download them to watch on my pc, but well worth the trouble. We only get the one channel, Fox, but the show Two and a Half men is actually a pretty decent comedy.
Comment by thatedeguy — February 18, 2008 @ 10:01 am PST
The Big Bang Theory on CBS
House, 24, Family Guy and American Dad on Fox
Comment by Andrew Ferguson — February 18, 2008 @ 11:32 am PST
thatedeguy - we haven’t seen any of the CSI but we keep hearing this is a good show and have looked over the DVD. I did record one of the CSI episodes over the weekend.
Andrew - thanks for the suggestions. We’ve got Family Guy and all the 24 seasons on DVD. Will check out The Big Bang Theory and American Dad.
Comment by TDavid — February 18, 2008 @ 12:09 pm PST
You might want leave your “days with no TV” counter up. All the Dish subscribers I know say it goes out in heavy rains. But you probably don’t get much rain where you live
Hope it works out better for you. “House”, “Numbers”, “Dogfights” series on the History Channel (fighter planes duking it out.)
Comment by Sedulous — February 18, 2008 @ 12:13 pm PST
Knock on wood so far, Sedulous. It rained all day yesterday and Dish never skipped a beat. Maybe that’s what the extra dish is combatting. The install guy said they did it to “strengthen the signal” and for HD. Seems better to me to have one bigger dish than two smaller ones, but whatever.
Comment by TDavid — February 18, 2008 @ 12:27 pm PST
The extra dish is to receive addition additional programming, such as HD (as you noted) and maybe even local channels. I’m assuming that the dishes are pointed in to different directions (although maybe only a few degrees apart), so you’re not going to be able to “strengthen the signal” as the install guy said.
Out of curiosity, are your dishes round or elliptical? We had DirecTV and they use an elliptical dish so that we can receive signals from multiple satellites that are spread further apart then would normally be receivable by a standard round dish.
Comment by Andrew Ferguson — February 18, 2008 @ 12:53 pm PST
Looks like the no contract might come to good use. Dish doesn’t use 2 dishes to “strengthen the signal,” they need it because the satellite’s to get the channels you wanted are in 2 different places. Directv is definitely better. And they have WAY MORE HD programs than dish. I canceled dish because they charge twice the price for HD and give you half the channels. Oh, and Direct only required 1 dish.
Comment by choover — February 18, 2008 @ 1:01 pm PST
Psych on USA: Not perfect but the cast makes it one fun show to watch.
Breaking Bad on AMC: Interesting series and Bryan Cranston is awesome
Mad Men on AMC: Great drama set in a 50’s ad agency…with all the political incorrectness intact.
Damages on FX: Just great Drama
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles: If you liked the first two movies, give this a go. I wanted to hate it and now can’t wait for new episodes each week.
A lot of people really get into Pushing Daisies(ABC), but it’s a little too desperately quirky for me.
Reaper (UPN) is a lot of fun also.
There’s a lot out there if you know where to find it.
Good luck!
Comment by Wayne — February 18, 2008 @ 1:43 pm PST
Andrew - yes they are pointing slightly different directions. I added a picture to the bottom of the post.
choover - DirecTV was great to us when we had them before, particularly with the Sunday Ticket. As mentioned in the post above, the reason we went with Dish in big part was not having to sign a contract. DirecTV did not make the same offer. With Comcast there are no contracts either, but they were the most expensive of the three and wanted to add a bunch of installation charges than neither DirecTV or Dish were going to charge. Oh and Comcast was only willing to cut the price for 6 months and then they were going to raise the price by $20/month more. Prices with Dish are guaranteed until Jan 2009 which by then we may have switched to somebody else or canceled it altogether.
Wayne - thank you for the additional recommendations. Already had Terminator in the DVR, and will look into the others.
Comment by TDavid — February 18, 2008 @ 3:53 pm PST
Torchwood BBCA
Doctor Who BBCA and SciFi
The Sarah Jane Adventures coming to SciFi in April
Burn Notice on USA back this summer
Monk USA
CSI Miami cause we all love Miami
Dexter (the Showtime version not the CBS version)
I’ll add more later…
Comment by FranciscoIV — February 18, 2008 @ 8:57 pm PST
One of my favorite things to do when the satellite dish goes out (I’m at the top of a hill so there’s a lot of winds that blow it back and forth) is call the Satellite company I’m presently with and negotiate for either a month of free service or an extra movie channel or the like. I’ve switched back and forth between dish and directv a few times over the years because the competition for customers is so competitive and they each offer great deals for ditching the competitor and signing up with them. Reminds me of the old long-distance phone plan wars of the 90’s.
Comment by Kevin — February 19, 2008 @ 6:01 pm PST
You know, my new roommate has a TV and in the 6 months I’ve lived with her, I’ve not used it once (other than to watch DVDs).
With that said, I do occasionally get a hankering to watch The Simpsons and I’m also kinda hooked on Lost. What’s amazing (and gratifying!) to me is that so much of this content is available on the ‘net… FREE and LEGALLY now (Hulu and ABC.com). If the networks keep this up (and I continue having a nice big computer monitor)… who cares about that TV box?
Comment by Adam — February 21, 2008 @ 3:53 am PST