Dang! I did forget that part.

I guess I'm in the minority. I have Dish and love it. I've had no problems in the last 10+ years that I've had them. The rate hikes aren't that bad, maybe like $5 a year, but almost every year they've compensated me with 3-5 free pay-per-view movies. I've lost signal only a handful of times since I've had them, all due to very severe weather. I have everything (all premiums and locals) and my bill is still less than my phone/internet bill (which is Charter by the way ).

ETA: And I've all good experiences when contacting customer service.

Talk to people in your local area. Quality varies depending on where you live.

Have a friend who had AT&T U-Verse and HATED it..it took them two days to come in and re-wire the house because according to them they could not use the other cable wires and once it was all set up all the t.v.'s would freeze up while you were watching them and just to up the frustration level a little more it would take forever to get any type of customer service. They switched back to Time Warner

yes it is

but this year I have to pay for it

This is my main reason for leaning towards Direct.

Cable is much more stable in terms of the HD signal and the much faster internet speeds than an satellite system such as Direct TV or Dish.

Problem with Comcast in my area is they don't even offer HD or internet. They've promised it would be coming for years, but still nothing. Funny thing is that they have HD and internet just 20 miles up the road.

you need to move up the road Bones!

Dang it. I was going to add that part and now I am kicking myself that you got to it first.

We've had Dish for four or five years now. The only time we've lost any connection was during an ice storm and all I had to do was pick the ice off the dish. Otherwise, no problem with wind or rain. And we get lots and lots of rain. I've never had to contact customer service because we've never had any problems. There are also perks, like free HBO or some other premium channel for a week or two throughout the month. The only time I remember my bill going up was when the 12 month promotion period was up. We have the top 120 basic package and the bill is $52 or $53 once all the government fees are tacked on.

Or you can use mine!!

I have DirecTV and my daughter has Dish. I think her reception has gone out more than mine and she lives across the street so we are in the same area. I did have to sweep the snow off once but just a few outages and not for too long a time. In fact, when the tornado hit here in April, my TV was still on when they told us to take cover fast.

I have DirecTV. I'm happy with it, except for the price. It's ridiculous. I have the middle package, no premium channels and it's $90 a month (free main DVR, $5 each for two bed room receivers, no HD, no whole house DVR). I pay $90 a month! I can call and complain and they'll drop it $5 for a year for being a "loyal customer". I even offered to sign a new 2 year contract to get the new customer price, nope not happening. I cant take advantage of any of the bundles because I'm an existing customer.

I've threatened to shut it off and go with Hulu and Netflix but my son pouts every time I do.

We have Dish at our cabin. Get next to no channels and they raised my price from $25 to $60. I called and they reduced it to $50, but when our contract is over this month, I plan to switch to Direct.

I had one guy at Dish all but do a Buwahahahahahahahahaha at me when I first complained about the price increase. "Well don't you know, there are Taxes and Fees and.......................

We have had both and had Dish for 15+ years before switching to Direct. Dish's customer service is horrible and you almost never talk to anyone in the U.S. It is outsourced out of country. I confirmed this when talking to them one time. They switched our local channels to out-of-state channels that we did not want. We asked them why we would pay for out-of-state local channels and they said that is because that is what our area had and that we had never had our in-state channels that we had for over 15 years. Even though my mother-in-law who lives next door has the same in-state channels that we had when they switched us out of the blue with no warning or anything. My husband told them they could come pick their equipment up out of the yard. (Although he didn't really heave them.) We promptly switched to Direct and have had no problems and have been with them for 3 years now.

Thanks everyone for the info. I think we will be going with Direct. I appreciate everyone offering the referral, but Tesla, since you beat everyone to the punch, would you message me your account number and we will use you as our referral? Thanks so much!

Don't have cable, Direct or Dish as I am unwilling to pay the prices the providers want for the service, especially when the quality of programming available is not worth 10 % of what they want. Netflix works just fine for watching any TV shows my wife or I may want to watch.

Ditto - although if they would let me choose which channels I want, I would go with one in a heartbeat. I don't really want that many but I want to choose which ones.

How does DirectTV compare to cable? I was thinking of switching but terrified to make the jump!

It depends on where you live, and what kind of trees, buildings, etc. you have around the dish. I HATED satellite in my house because they couldn't get a good line towards the horizon because of the large oak and walnut trees around my home. THey had to put it on a post on top the roof, and every time the wind blew hard, it was out of alignment. Time Warner Cable, on the other hand, has only gone down when the power goes out.

Are you looking for a price comparison? Channels? Service?

Price-wise, DirectTV is cheaper, I have already looked into that myself. Channel-wise I can compare the channel line-ups. So mainly service. How often does it go out, what is the quality, etc?

My Direct TV goes out often. It does not have to be wind and rain alone. Seems like when I get over 100 degrees in the summer the HD channels start to pixelate and I have to switch to the non-HD version of the channel I am watching.

Plus, like RR up there, the cost of the bundle is getting outrageous. I pay $178 a month for middle package (no premium movie channels), land line phone and DSL internet from Verizon.

They count on people being too lazy to switch providers.

It's pretty well what this says. We first lived in a house surrounded by trees. We had to mount the dish on the old T.V. tower and the more the trees grew the higher we moved the dish - to get that view of the southern sky.

We now live in the middle of a wheat field, where it is very windy, and we mainly see disturbances from Oklahoma's extremely high, stormy winds, but never from our daily winds, which probably rum 5-15 mpg, sometimes higher. We've had DirecTV over 20 years and are satisfied. The customer service is good, IMO. I can't speak for price comparison, having never checked it out.

If I could get local channels on Netflix/Hulu (can you?) I would just do that and forget all the rest.

I hate the hassle of changing...but when I glanced at the channel selections on Dish basic vs Direct basic...I really think Direct had Dish beat by a mile.