DirectTV is on the way
January 8th, 2009 | Published in House, Television | 4 Comments
For those of you that have been following me on Twitter, I have recently been asking around about customer experiences with DirectTV. I have been unhappy for a while with Time Warner. Not only because of their horrible customer service and long wait times, but also because most of their HD channels are hit or miss. And most of the time they are a miss.
I can never get CNN or FOX News in HD and many of the stations cut out 50% of the time. And Time Warner’s rates are nothing to really write home about. So I finally made the decision to switch to DirectTV. After looking through much of their online FAQs and watching some of their videos about what features they offer their customers, I placed an order online. It’s being set up this coming Saturday afternoon. I’m pretty excited about the ability to control the DVR from work should I forget to record a show or even want to have a movie downloaded to the DVR so that I can watch it when I get home that evening.
I have also discovered quite a bit of information that many of the sales people don’t know about the DVR boxes. I called DirectTV a few times to ask questions about the DVR boxes and I got many contradictary answers between sales people. After digging around and finding a few videos and documentation, I was able to get the answers I needed in order to make sure that I would be capable of doing everything I wanted once the system was installed.
I’ll keep you posted about how everything turns out after the install.
January 14th, 2009 at 11:15 am (#)
I have been a DirecTV customer for about 8 years now. Basically, their customer support sucks. They are generally clueless and I think they like to bait-n-switch. Write everything down the sales guys say, and be sure to get their employee number so you can back it up.
But, once you get settled with them, the service is pretty stable, and I am happy with it. A year ago I upgraded to High Def and their second generation DVR. The DVR interface sucks and it needs rebooting much more often than it should. Tivo rules in this regard! But it’s tolerable. I recently read that DirecTV and Tivo signed an agreement that the third generation DirecTV DVRs will again be based on Tivo. Awesome.
With the exception of the few times per year that we get a strong enough thunderstorm to knock out reception of the satellite signal for ten minutes, my reception has been solid. The number of HD channels is significant compared to what I would have received by switching to Time Warner. Some channels such as HDNet look spectacular in 1080P.
January 16th, 2009 at 3:48 pm (#)
HDNet only transmits 1080i. In fact, what you’ll find on all HD signals (be it broadcast, satellite, cable, FIOS, etc) is either 720p or 1080i. Basically, it’s a matter of bandwidth and the method of encoding & decoding of the digital signal. Technically, they *can* transmit 1080p, but only in a framerate that is significantly worse than it would be if interlaced or at 720p. So, they don’t.
Blu-Ray Disc is currently the ONLY way to watch in pure, native 1080p.
I don’t know how DirecTV’s current HD-DVR is. Their first try at a DVR was pretty crappy…we still have one. It couldn’t decide what to record last night since the Presidential Address threw everything off my 15 minutes. Hopefully they’ve learned their lesson, as we too will be receiving an HD-DVR before too long.
January 21st, 2009 at 10:37 pm (#)
Rusty, thanks for the blog love…yeah I cannot believe how fast the past two years have gone! Ben & Amy’s wedding was a lot of fun…
January 26th, 2009 at 2:07 pm (#)
Peaches I just discovered your blog.
You are twisted. But in a good way.