Dish or DirecTV? Best bang for the buck

December 4, 2005 10:00 AM

Dish Network or DirecTV? Which plan?

I am looking to replace my cable connection with a satellite TV.

What I want: three rooms, at least one DVR (two would be better, three would be much better), SD only, all channels except the movie channels, low price.

What I don't care about: Sports.

I was a happy Dish Network customer for a while, but I switched to cable in the new house because of the cable modem. Because of price hikes, I'll come out ahead if I can find a satellite option for about $75/month or under. I'm currently leaning towards Dish with two boxes (one is a DVR with support for 2 TVs, the other is a regular box that supports one TV).

Firewire out would be a plus, but isn't required.

I would also like to take advantage of any holiday specials that might be offered. Dish has a current deal for a free Sirius radio, but I already have one. Long term commitment (18-24 months) is no problem, because I don't plan on switching to HDTV for at least two more years.

Suggestions?

posted by bh to Technology (14 answers total)

DirecTV is the place to be if you want sports. Or TiVo. If you just want a DVR and not necessarily TiVo, then this won't be a factor. (However, TiVo is very nice.) Last I checked, Dish had more "basic" channels than DirecTV. There are several channels a Dish-using friend gets that I (DirecTV user) don't.

DirecTV recently switched over its music channels to XM, so since you already have Sirius, that might be nicely complementary.
posted by kindall at 10:11 AM on December 4, 2005

If you go with DirecTV, I'd suggest using American Satellite as a vendor. They can get you DirecTV with 3-room installation and one DVR for a grand total of $0, installed. I think extra DVRs go for about $100. (I've used them, and so have a lot of my friends and family. So far everyone's been happy.)

After that, DirecTV with everything but movies and sports packages runs about $50/mo.

Make sure you get the 3-LNB dish that hits all the satellites. For the moment it will get you a few extra channels, but if you ever go HD, you won't need to hire somebody to get up on your roof and replace the dish.
posted by I Love Tacos at 10:17 AM on December 4, 2005

Rupert Murdoch owns Direct TV, so if you go with them you'll have to be constantly cleaning up the evil that drips from the receiver. That stuff can be hell on the carpets.
posted by faceonmars at 10:31 AM on December 4, 2005

We recently decided to dump cable TV (analog) in favor of a basic satellite package supplemented with BitTorrents. Exhaustive research of channel offerings and pricing guides revealed that Dish and DTV are pretty much at parity for our needs, and it seems reasonable for that parity to apply pretty much across the board as they're both targeting an identical market / audience. The deal-maker for me was for a lousy $5.00 extra a month, I don't have to plug my satellite receiver into the phone line. From a privacy perspective, hooray, because my box has no way to "phone home" with my household viewing habits. It makes pay-per-view more expensive, but we don't use that (see above BitTorrent reference.) Also, we don't have a land line in our house, just cell phones, so as it turns out DTV didn't even offer service. *shrug* Just my $.02.
posted by ZakDaddy at 10:50 AM on December 4, 2005

And what faceonmars said, although I'd submit that once you get past a certain market cap, all large corporations have evil-ish tendencies.
posted by ZakDaddy at 10:51 AM on December 4, 2005

For the record, I've had DirecTV for years and have never -- not once -- had to clean up evil that had dripped from the receiver, become caked in the hardware, or otherwise fouled the AV area. It's a generally non-threatening device, though honestly, it occasionally requires some dusting.

However, the RCA remote is absolute pure stinking evil, requiring me to crack it hard and repeatedly against the coffee table to get the buttons to work, most often that blasted "5" or the snotty little page-down / down-arrow thing.

FWIW, I pay 58 bucks for Total Choice Plus, no locals, and the Starz package.
posted by mumeishi at 11:14 AM on December 4, 2005

I greatly perfer Dish. DirecTV involves paying more for all the sports.
posted by k8t at 11:33 AM on December 4, 2005

Also, we don't have a land line in our house, just cell phones, so as it turns out DTV didn't even offer service.

You don't need a phone line to use DirecTV. They will say you do until their faces turns blue, but you don't. If worst comes to worst and you get an extra receiver that must be activated by phone, you can do so, once, at a friend's house and never again. Pay-per-view may be ordered online at no extra charge.
posted by deadfather at 12:12 PM on December 4, 2005

If you're planning to use the DVR a lot, Dish is not the way to go. Their DVR software/interface is stupid, unlike the one for DirecTV. For example, if you tell the Dish DVR to record "Veronica Mars" every Wednesday at 8pm, it will record that time slot, no matter WHAT is on that channel.

From what I've seen of DirecTV, it uses the TiVo interface, which is much better.
posted by Serena at 1:12 PM on December 4, 2005

direcTV has ended their contract with tivo and they have (foolishly, IMHO) decided to develop/outsource their own DVR. tivo has hooked up with comcast and there should be tivo-based software for the comcast DVR sometime in 2006.

the high definition directivo is the last tivo platform for DirecTV (D*) and its more than a year old at this point.

D* is moving to mpeg4 to try to get all the local HD channels up on their birds and there will be no mpeg4 support on any directivo as far as anyone can tell.

dish is probably behind in the HD race, so if that's important to you, directv is probably your choice.

of course as others have said, murdoch owns D* and he is pure evil.
posted by joeblough at 1:34 PM on December 4, 2005

DirectTV just switched from the Tivo interface to their own, though you may still be able to get a Tivo box from a dealer (those who use them don't have to switch or anything)

They're pretty similar. DirecTV has more sports. Echostar has more foreign channels. I think Echostar is usually a bit cheaper, though it depends on your exact system. Either the 60 or 120 channel packages would fit your needs. The latter now offers all of Sirius' music channels thru your tv.
posted by spira at 1:36 PM on December 4, 2005

direcTV has ended their contract with tivo and they have (foolishly, IMHO) decided to develop/outsource their own DVR. ... D* is moving to mpeg4 to try to get all the local HD channels up on their birds and there will be no mpeg4 support on any directivo as far as anyone can tell.

That said, the mpeg4 switch for non-HD channels will not take place for quite some time ... maybe until 2008 or later. And when that happens. DirecTV will likely replace your DirecTiVo with one of its own boxes for free. And they really are pretty similar. The same or more functionality, less pretty, but faster.

Bah. Stop listening to MeFites. Go visit the dbstalk forums for Dish and DirecTV.
posted by deadfather at 2:57 PM on December 4, 2005

As a new customer, you should be able to get a great deal on installation/equipment from either service. Try checking out the many forums out there, such as TiVo Community or DBSForums.

If you decide to go with DirecTV, you need to do it soon, so you can still (as previously mentioned) get one of the DirecTV DVRs with Tivo, rather than their new DirecTV branded DVR without Tivo.
posted by jca at 3:36 PM on December 4, 2005

As long as you're not using Dish for internet access, you're okay. Starband, their Internet arm, is the worst trainwreck of a company ever. Their service sucks and their customer service is way, way, WAY past dismal. They HUNG UP ON ME after an HOUR of waiting on the phone. (My mom's on Dish and was on Starband, and was having trouble I was trying to get her through.)

Dish itself is rather slimy, though... they have a telemarketing arm that will call you to death. I got over SEVEN HUNDRED CALLS from them over a six week period despite my pleas with them to stop. Once I was able to file a complaint with the No Call List (my number hadn't been blocked) the calls stopped the NEXT DAY, so it's not like they couldn't have stopped all the way along.

So between Starband and Dish's telemarketing arm, I push people to look into DirectTV.
posted by Malor at 4:47 AM on December 5, 2005