Dish vs. Direct TV: Transition Observations

 We just switched over - or should I say back, again? This time we dropped Dish after they doubled the price the second our contract ended, and we got a price from Direct a couple dollars lower than our regular bill had been from Dish. We tend to do this every two years. Both are owned by AT&T, but some kind of regulations keep them from offering identical services. As a result we have both satellite dishes on our house roof, pointing in different directions. Even after asking the first time we switched for them to remove the old dish, they refused. Apparently it's cheaper to leave the dish on the roof even if they don't know if we will be back. Oh well. When Direct showed up last week for resuming our service with them after two years, the installer spent several minutes on our roof making some changes in the equipment to bring it up to date. Our reception is great, clearer than I recall from last week.

We're getting used to the new-to-us-again-this-time system, and find some things better than the others, some not so much. Of course it would be ideal if both companies had the best of both combined, but that's not going to happen. But while I still have Dish's system using their remote ingrained as a habit, I want to compare the two. The remotes are different, so any switch means getting used to where our fingers need to go this time. We hit a lot of wrong buttons...  this is our excuse and we're sticking to it for as long as we need! Actually, this remote has curved sides instead of straight ones, so the the way it fits in the hand makes being in the right area punching keys much easier for muscle memory. We just need familiarity instead of needing to look through all the new buttons' locations.

Most obvious is the change in which channels are at which station numbers. All the broadcast channels are the same. 3 and 5 are still CBS, 8 is PBS, 12 is NBC, 15 is ABC. Oh yes, easily forgotten is that 10 is FOX. Other favorite stations have different numbers, and since Direct didn't come through on their promise to email me a station guide, we have to hunt for MSNBC, Cooking, SCIFY, and Animal Planet networks as just some examples. Once we locate and set a timer we can go in to any recorded program and the info gives us the number we can go to the guide for if we want to do further searches on that channel.  Or we do what I did and wrote the number down once we found each station. I did take the precaution of writing down all our set timers on the Dish DVR before having it disconnected, so we'd remember to set them all on the new one. Both systms have the problem of not setting any timer on a program not aired within about 8 days, and January is a great time for many regular programs to be on hiatus. PBS offers the additional complication of broadcasting many favorites in 6 or 10 episode seasons, and then replacing them with something else. You have to know to look for shows returning on a regular basis to set that timer the first time in either system after a switch. Setting a recurring timer on Direct is easier than on Dish. Direct just need a second tap of the key you just pushed to record. Dish offers you a menu to go through, not onerous, just a bit extra.

One bonus of Direct is that some of those PBS programs wind up on Ovation ( for one example) and it hunts them down and records them too. Dish requires you to know everywhere a show airs and set another timer there. I'm currently watching early seasons of some favorites I only discovered recently, so not only are they available, I can catch up on the characters' early history. It also solves an ongoing problem with one particular program, Midsomer Murders as  aired on PBS. Ovation records it as a single program lasting 2 1/2 ours, adding commercials. (I can avoid those with fast forward.) PBS airs it as two consecutive programs with the same title and Dish would only record the first, ignoring the second even when there was plainly the "record" symbol on it, thinking it had already just recorded it the previous hour. It gets frustrating only getting half a program every time. I'd have to be paying attention and record the second half of a future airing. Mostly I gave up. Now it's recorded as a unit, so I just have to be sure to watch when I'm not sleepy because it can be soporific and I can miss it all anyway.

Dish actually made timers easier in a few ways. We had access to a list of timers already set, and variations we could add to them, such as start time and end time variations,  whether we wanted all airings or just new programs, and could get a list of everything scheduled to record for the upcoming day or two. We could stop any particular program without killing the whole timer. 

If we wanted to turn closed captions on or off, on Dish it was two button pushes. Direct makes us go through about 15 button pushes - when I have more patience, I'll actually count. It's into menu, down to the bottom of the list of options, across another 8 buttons to "accessibility", tap the arrow down, select, retreat back to the major options list, before you can exit and return to your program. Unless you do it during a commercial you want to skip, it also requires pausing the program and reversing that once you return. Come to think of it, it's gotta be more than 20 buttons. As I said, when I think about it, I'll actually count. 

We tend to have captioning on during scripted programs, and off during any thing live, like news. Scripted programs print out what the script called for, giving us a chuckle when actors go off script, or accidentally swear, but making what we read make sense. Steve's hearing is not as good as mine these days, so he relies on it more, and I appreciate not needing the volume blasting while he can still know what's going on. Both of us appreciate it when somebody has an accent, a soft voice, or speaks in a foreign language like "Anika", a new favorite crime drama on PBS with a main character who is autistic and still learning to cope with lots of people and whom those people are learning to appreciate on her job. It's all in French, so all subtitled anyway. With its conversation pretty rapid-fire, rewind is also appreciated. News programs on the other hand never manage to keep up with what is being said, so hilarity or frustration trump understanding in their captioning. When closed captioning covers whatever news banners the news networks offer, neither is understood. Both company's captioning is the same, just the length of time to change back and forth that is different.

We have some new channels with Direct that we have missed with Dish, like BBC and National Geographic. I haven't found yet what we may be missing in exchange. Meanwhile we're looking forward to seeing the newest seasons of Doctor Pol, Dr. Oakley, and whatever else we find. After watching those, and how real vets treat real animals, we tend to criticize how TV dramas get it wrong. It's like real cops picking apart police shows for all the awful ways they get it wrong.

Dish let us organize recorded programs into folders for the one person who wanted to watch it. Since it's just the two of us, it's not really a loss. We both know only he likes the cooking shows and only I like the political ones. Mostly we both like the same dramas, though Steve will go through marathons of certain old programs that I've already seen the first three times but he's not tired of yet. (Hint: Chicago Fire.) Since we communicate well, it's not an issue, and we negotiate either way on which ones get watched when the other isn't in the room and which we plan to watch together without needing a folder to tell us. When we're up in Paul's house, it comes in very handy, and he keeps Dish with its folders. (Side note: Paul added extra sound equipment to his set-up, as well as a PlayStation which runs DVDs, so there is another relearning process for the extra buttons on his remote.)

Dish also gave us a day to retrieve a program that got deleted from its "trash" cache. Direct gives us a couple seconds to push a second request to delete something, in case that button was accidentally pushed or somebody wanted to recheck something first, but then gone is gone. Making it easier to delete something on Direct is actually an advantage when we don't want to skip through the last three minutes of commercials at the end of the program, or for any reason, run all the way to the end before deleting. We just have a little red delete button on the remote and it's gone right now.

Speaking of skipping content, Dish gave us a straight 30-second jump. Blink! Direct gives us a view, very fast, of what was in that 30 seconds so we know when to stop skipping because the program is back. Commercial breaks take up more or less time than we anticipated, likely to fool whatever system we have developed to skip through them, and we now know immediately and by how much. If we needed with Dish to make a large jump either way, we had a 300 X speed option. Direct is a little slower. But since most of those super fast jumps were to get to the end to delete it, we mostly don't need it.

There was a decided difference in getting things started up. Two years ago, Dish had an actual printed channel guide, with full lists of what was included in basic and each step up in choices in programs. Options were discussed without pressure. This time Direct was determined to sell us the "Entertainment" package because it gave us football, even though I told the India call center person on the phone that we don't watch sports and just want the basic. When out installer showed up, it was promised that "when they got back to the office" it would be fixed for us. Following up on that, I discovered it hadn't been done, so another long call to the call center. Those always annoy me because their personnel are so totally scripted that once they think they know what you need, they are off and running with some long paragraph. When their answer doesn't match your question, yelling "Shut Up!" as a last resort to interrupt them is the only thing I've found that actually gets their attention. I presume some supervisor is standing over their shoulder making sure they "do it right" by the script. I did finally get what I needed, the cheaper package which fills our needs, and welcomed the email requesting feedback with a box for a written (unscripted!!) explanation of why you answered the way you did.

Our installer came in with an "account manager" from ATT who was determined to sell Steve on switching his phone and network to ATT and it would be cheaper. Turns out Steve would have an upgraded phone for less than a couple dollars difference. That was still OK with Steve, but his current company wasn't willing to work with the ATT guy who kept insisting he was Steve but had to pause and ask Steve for each piece of information needed to make the switch over. Seriously, if you hear "I am Steve" followed by "How do you spell your last name?" or "What's your birthday?", wouldn't you be a tad reluctant to make changes on somebody's account? The ATT guy promised to call later that day to finish the process. Steve called him much later and there was an excuse. But "tomorrow after their meeting, say 9:00" and no call, then in the afternoon, the "meeting was still going on" and no call even over the weekend. On Tuesday Steve was still trying to connect, despite the improvements on the ATT phone being in software he doesn't and won't use, and the savings being nearly nil. He took his phone to bed with him late that morning, waiting for the latest promised call back. We agreed if it didn't happen it's not really worth the hassle.

However, that same guy promised, as an "upsale" a three month free trial of three movie channels which we could / should end just before the time ran out so they'd stay free. Of course the hope is customers forget the date and they get charged the premium rates, or actually decided to keep the upgrade. After our other issues, do you want to venture an opinion on whether we even have those channels yet? Yeah, I don't see any pigs up in the sky either.

I'm just wondering how to get ahold of the right people at ATT and let them know just how "helpful" their account manager really is. We have his business card. Perhaps he shouldn't leave that behind if he's not going to come through with what he glibly offers.

Meanwhile in less than a week the remote is becoming habit and we're settling in.