Good to know. This may make a difference with 60 inch TV

Maybe it was the hardware we had with Direct TV, but I thought Dish looked better on our 55" plasma and 40" LCD TVs. I'm not a movie buff though.

Another feature I like is the ability to auto skip ("auto-hop") the commercials on select shows. I also like that the Dish skip buttons skip instantly, not like our old Direct TV that actually fast forwards at about 5 speed. On Dish I hit the skip button 6 times to skip 3 minutes of commercials in about 2 seconds, on Direct TV I'd have to view 3 minutes of commercials played at 5 speed.

I recall we had to pay extra for HD on Direct TV, but it was included with Dish.

With Direct TV we had to buy a sling box to watch TV anywhere, with Dish it is in the receiver.

Dish records 8 channels at once, Direct TV 5.

If you are a NFL buff, you'll want Direct TV as it has the NFL Sunday Ticket

Direct TV offers 4K, Dish does not yet.

If you get a lot of snow, satellite can be iffy. Those dish heaters are also crap...also make sure you're not being charged a rental on them from Direct, which is what happened to the in-laws.

And yes, it is shit in bad weather.

I would take the ability to record 8 or 5, anything beats the 2 we can record and you have to watch one of the 2 being recorded, so if there are 3 you want to watch, you can't record 2 and watch 1, you can record 2, but one of the 2 you have to watch.

The cable company does now offer a box that will record 6 shows, but they didn't last year when we got ours.


*no dish or direct tv up here, we do have satellite but they are owned by the cable companies, and not worth having.*

You're referring to the 30-second slip. It is switchable to a skip very easily (and always has been since the early TiVo-powered boxes).

HD is free with the same criteria as Dish. If you don't sign up for auto-pay, you don't get it - as with most of the other offers.

DirecTV also has the ability to watch on demand and on other devices with no additional cost. In fact, they had it BEFORE Dish but didn't need to make a big deal about it.

Wait. What?

Only if you auto-record the networks, otherwise you can only record two. This is misleading. I think to record eight, you need a Super-Joey, right?

The DirecTV Genie will record five totally select-able channels at once.

As well as 4k, there is a pay 3D movie channel too.


I know this looks like I'm anti-Dish and perhaps I am a little. I've had both AND I've worked for a cable company too. DirecTV suits me best. For someone else, their requirements are probably not as exacting as mine and are happy with other services.

For the sake of complete disclosure, I only have the choise of the two satellite companies where I live, so cable is not an option for me. If it was, my answers may well be different.

I had no problem with Direct TV until the service inexplicably stopped working the day of the World Cup final. Remember the Brazil vs. Germany game last year?

I canceled their service after being on their helpline for over an hour with a couple of different bell-ends disguised as customer service representatives. I now don't have cable TV or satellite. Because screw that. It's all a high priced low service industry.

The in-laws still have Direct TV. Where is the option to skip instead of slip? They would be very happy to have this again. I couldn't find that info on their website. All we found was
https://support.directv.com/app/answ...0second%20slip

Let me Google that for you...

To go back, just repeat and change it to '30SLIP'.

Yeah, I found that, but it isn't documented by Direct TV anywhere. It appears to be a 'hidden feature' or crude hack rather than an endorsed feature.

Whilst you 'Googled' that, did you also note some people stating it didn't work? or they had to reset their receiver first to get it to work? Hardly seems like a supported feature now does it. What is the key combination for infinite lives, or to reset your wanted status....

I can't search for it now, but it actually is documented - or at least it was when the HRxx receivers were introduced. Maybe in the manual.

The older TiVo powered units could do it too, but they had to be reprogrammed whenever they were rebooted.