Cable vs. Direct TV - anyone make the switch?

[Jeanne]

I loathe my cable company. Their prices are sky high due to zero competition and they offer very little for the basic plus cable package. The quote I got for digital was outrageous and it makes me ill to give them any more money. I was waiting for Verizon to run fiber but that looks to be at least 2-3 years away and I don’t want to wait that long.

That being said, I'm considering a switch to Direct TV. Best Buy seems to sell the best package and it also comes with Tivo. Some of you out there must have this? What do you think?

I'm so not one for hassle so if you find this to be a hassle in any way, will you advise? Also, is it true that new wires would have to be run? Our incoming cable is not in a southern exposure and I know it’s not going to be easy to run these wires through our old stone wall where studs are not on center. I dread what this will do to my interior.

I also want to add that I had digital cable for 6 months for a promo but was informed that I'd have to wait another 6 months for another. And the hassle of the box is just too much to deal with. Their prices are seriously too disgraceful to keep the digital subscription during non promo times.

Help me decide please oh please?! Is it worth it? Do you love it? I have been trying to educate myself on satellite but haven’t found any comprehensive sites out there yet.

[brigmaman]

Jeanne, cable was not available here when we built our house so we had no other option. Our directv is run through the existing cable wires. But then we don't have basic cable even now, so I don't know if you can do both through the same wires. We do, however have cable for our modem. I believe only the dish has to face the south.
Also, you'll need to have the recievers permanently hooked up to a phone line. We don't because we have Vonage and only one phone jack. So that just means that we can't order movies with the remote, we have to do it online.
We love the Directv. We've had only a few outages and that was on very heavy snow days.
I would suggest getting all recievers at once. When we did it (this may have changed by now) you had to know where tv's would be in the house. (Not an easy task w/a new house that is being built) so that you would know how many receivers you'll need. We weren't able to add receivers after the fact. Hope that all makes sense.

[Mommy_Again]

We get free basic cable with our HOA, but if we didn't we'd use DirecTV. We had it in our previous house (with Tivo) and loved it. Just check the satellite location placement (facing SW) on your home.

[kath68]

We've had both, and I much prefer DirectTV. I have blocked out my experience with cable, it was that bad, otherwise I'd tell you more about what I hated (besides cost and inferior service).

As for the cable -- DH took care of all of it, so I only have the vaguest notion of how it is we have DirectTV in two rooms. I think it might be the gnomes who make it work.

But, there is a cable that runs from the dish, under the eaves of my roof, and down into the crawlspace. I think from there it is just like regular cable, and it comes up from the floor behind the t.v.s.

HTH.

[kellyotn]

My mom and dad were in a similar situation in that there was only one cable provider in town, the quality was terrible and the prices kept going up w/ no positive benefits for the consumer for said price increase. Then loads of people started getting DirectTV and DishNetwork. :-) Not surprisingly the cable company upgraded their lines and stopped raising their prices w/ in a year or so. ha ha.

Anyway, they got DishNetwork and are happy with it. They have a non-Tivo brand DVR and like it, thought it isn't as good as ours in terms of recording two things and the ability to find shows you might like, etc. We have DirectTV and **love** it. (See the lengthy Tivo thread below.)

They did run new cables for us. We had Mediacom cable before, I'm not sure why they didn't use those cables. The new cables run down under our roofline to the groundlevel, then horizontally along the foundation line to the outside box. Inside, you can see cables in the garage along one wall and the ceiling, but in the house they are run behind the walls. It was a hassle for the cable guy I guess, but not for me!! Just had to be home was the extent of my hassle.

I think the best way for you to find out about it would be to find someone near you who has it, how the install goes, etc. I say its TOTALLY and worth it to get out from under a cable monopoly-type company. The picture is great, the menus are good and Tivo/DVR's just plain rock. ;-)

[cleo27]

Just to echo what others have said, we have had Directv for almost 3 years and we *love* it!!! Cannot say enough good things about it. I hated Comcast (like you said, no competition). We used to frequently have line problems and they were not quick to come out to fix it. I also got so agravated that they seemed to constantly be raising our rates.

Directv has never raised our rates in all this time, and it has only ever gone out for brief intervals during really bad thunder storms.


ETA that Directv is much cheaper than basic cable.

HTH,

[jhrabosk]

When we moved into our current home (lower 2 floors of a 3-story row house) 3 years ago, the local cable company didn't offer the YES network (Yankee baseball TV) which was unacceptable to my resident Yankee fanatic. :p So, we had to install DirecTV. We have it in two-rooms and have since upgraded both to TiVo as well.

We LOVE DirecTV and TiVo and have had no problems with either. The install was a minor hassle...I won't lie. And DH still hasn't run a 2nd line to the new TiVo box b/c of the hassle involved in climbing on the roof and drilling a new hole in the masonry. But once it's all in, it's an absolute joy.

It limits your options for high-speed internet, unfortunately. The satellite service offered is way too expensive, so we had to go with Verizon DSL. And we've kept our landline, but that's not a big deal to me personally.

I think we pay around $60/month, including 2 TiVo boxes and HBO service...

[wagner36]

We had DirectTV for years and then actually switched back to cable! One of the reasons is that our house is in a historic district, and we couldn't see anyone else with the dish on their house (we since have). We would have to pay extra to have it installed the roof, too, since we have a walk-up attic. The other reason was that, living in the midwest, our directTV went out a lot for snow in the winter, and we would have to stand on a railing to get the snow off of dish, and in our current house that would be impossible.

I am actually thrilled with our cable provider now. We have On Demand, which is truly wonderful!

I was never unhappy with directTV though (other than for weather), but it isn't practical where we live now.

[o_mom]

We currently have Directv and love it. We previously had DishNetwork and really liked them too. We only switched because our trees grew too tall and blocked the Dish Network Sats. Service is comparable, the only diff being the availability of some packages(NFL, etc.) and slight price differences. You may get a package discount with Dish if you have SBC phone service.

If your house is on a basement or crawl, wiring is pretty easy. They can also use the existing cable, the just have to tap in somewhere.

This site has a lot of technical discussion:

http://www.dbsforums.com/

This one has installation info:

http://www.dbsinstall.com/

[kellyotn]

I forgot about package pricing! We go thru Qwest telephone for the phone, DSL internet and DirectTV. Getting all three from DishNetwork was VERY expensive as their internet was satallite cable or something and therefore very costly.

So, you might want to compare both for your area.

[pittsburghgirl]

We switched to directTV because our digital cable bill kept going up while they took away channels. (We had to have OLN to watch the Tour de France, and they moved it to a package two tiers up.)

We have TIVO, so we had to have a phone jack installed near our TV, our house is very short on phone jacks.

The DirectTV guy just tapped into the cable that was already going into the house, although it was coming in on the southern side of the house already. But he didn't need to run anything new on the wall, he just tacked the cable from the dish over to where the old cable went into the house.

The only annoying thing we find about the TIVO (we only have one TIVO box, our two others are regular directTV boxes) is that you can't watch something else while something is being recorded. And none of our old VCR equipment is compatible so we can't use it on the other two TVs. So if one of us wants to TIVO something, the other has to go to another room/TV to watch another program.

All told it is costing a little less than our digital cable package cost, so it seemed to make sense to switch. The only times we have had interruption is during big thunderstorms, occasionally the signal will get lost for a little while.

We just got fiber internet service from Verizon, though, so once they start offering television service we may switch over to that.

Marilee
mommy to James
http://lilypie.com/baby2/040120/1/1/1/-5/.png

[Judegirl]

We've done both and love Direct TV - no problems thus far (a year and a half), a better picture, and much better package options. I never give the satellite a second thought.

HTH,
Jude

[RwnMayfair]

When we moved into this place, we went with DirecTV instead of cable because the option where we are had horrible reviews. That, and we got a discount on it because we use Verizon for our DSL. We love it, it's much better than any cable company we've used, other than TimeWarner. (We really liked them when we had them years and years ago - I have no idea what they're like now, or if they even still offer cable service.) It's also cheaper than cable would be here and offers better options.

We don't have TiVo, so I can't comment on that. But DirecTV has been wonderful, in my opinion. We didn't do the installation, but the guys who came and did it had no troubles doing it. The wires come in where the cable wires were. (The previous owners had cable.) I'd definitely recommend it.

-Melissa

Taran, November 20, 2003
Elowen, August 20, 2005

http://www.gynosaur.com/assets/ribbons/ribbon_emerald_18m.gif - Eighteen months!
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http://b1.lilypie.com/slsgm4/.png

[Jeanne]

Ladies,
Thank you all so much for your responses. I've heard negative comments here and there but I'm convinced that reception problems are all about bad installation. I am now confident that this is the solution. I'm also going to call Verizon to see if I can get a package discount for our land line, DSL, and Direct TV.

I'm off to read the links too! Thanks again!

[DebbieJ]

We have Dish Network with DVR and love it! We previously had Digital Cable with Time Warner, which was great, but Dish prices are better.

I have two $25 coupons for Dish Network if anyone is interested. It takes $25 off your first bill. Email me through the boards please.

~ deb
DS born at home 12/03
Breastfed for 20 months and 6 days

http://www.bfar.org/members/fora/style_avatars/Ribbons/18months-bfar.jpg

[hobey]

The newer TIVO boxes from Directv have two tuners, so you can watch one channel and record another or record two channels and watch a recorded show. Or you can watch two shows at once, rewinding the show on the other tuner back to the last commercial break. :)

You need to run two cables from the dish to the tuner box, but on a new install, they will take care of this for you.

As for the phone jack, if you don't have one available and near the tv, RCA makes a wireless jack system for about $40. You plug it into an electrical outlet and connect it into a phone jack (we do this in our guest bedroom). Then you plug in the other part into an outlet near the tv and run a phone cable from it to the Tivo (it's all hidden behind the entertainent center).


Chad
Nathan's Dad 12/19/03