fatbrit

Neither, nor. Use a Netflix subscription and a Roku box. Cost: $9/month. The same endless crap you get on cable/satellite but at least you get to choose what you're watching and when. As an added bonus, you can even see the latest DVD releases via the snail mail.

For the extremely Scottish who can do with slightly less variety, just connect your computer to the telly and point your browser at hulu.

TimberHut

Directv - simply because they carry the NFL Sunday Ticket. Dish don't.

As I'm a Broncos fan living in Indiana this was pretty important.

You can get NFL Network, Fox Soccer Channel & Setanta USA on both Dish & Directv.

As for the non-sport stuff? It all seems pretty similar to me. They'll flash a price up of '20 bucks a month for 1,000 channels' (or whatever) but when you get down to seeing what you actually get you soon find yourself subscribing to a higher cost package.

Both channels seem to make claims about who has the most HD channels. Directv has a great selection of stuff in HD - I presume Dish has as well. This is all changing very fast anyway - more channels are broadcasting in HD each month.

DVR - I know I can DVR programs from online using Directv. This is pretty handy sometimes. Not sure if you can do this on Dish? Probably though!

Both make claims of being the most reliable, best customer service etc. Who knows? You'll only hear the stories of peoples bad experiences.

Just decide what channels you want, if you want HD and/or DVR and go on the sites and price it up. I know Directv's site was very easy to use. It would give you the options available and price it up as you chose stuff.

Whatever one you choose it is all a bit of a rip-off - if it wasn't for the Sports Channels I'd probably just stick to having an antennae and watch TV for free (no poxy BBC in the USA to pay a licence fee to!)

Braintreegirl

To be honest we're not sure what to do for the best as there seems to be an abundance of small print like Poppygirl said, and we would have to get the gold package to get the football anyway. Our satellite dish in the uk used to give us bad reception in bad weather so we're not too sure where we might stand with this either - difficult to know and once they tie you in you're stuffed for two years I guess.

Duncan Roberts

Don't take everything you see on the Dish or DirecTV websites as gospel. I know for DirecTV you can get Fox Soccer channel (plus some other sports channels) added to any package for $5 a month. We've had a bunch of snow on our dish for the last couple of weeks and there is no difference in the reception. It's actually better than with cable which used to go out, pixelate the picture, screw up the sound all the time when it was raining or snowing.

Poppy girl

There should be a 30days get out clause, and all of them will want a contract,when I lived in Illinois we started with DTV and it was dreadful, kept losing the signal. when Ist got to CA a few years back it was perfect.

Have a read of the Wiki on the Technology side it's easier then me faffying about trying to explain

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_television

Duncan Roberts

For DirecTV it's 15 days from when the account was created. That doesn't mean the date you had it installed, it's when you either call them or go online to set up the account and installation.

Braintreegirl

That's not very long is it?

Poppy girl

Doesn't surprise me in the least, I just looked at some very old paper work that I had and it was 28 days.........Sods hey!!

scrubbedexpat097

We have had both DTV and Dish Network.

We have Dish right now and their customer service has been so much better than DTV. We also have Fox Soccer and we add Setanta for the season then drop it in May for a few months.

DTV were always srewing up our bill and calling them to get it corrected was a nightmare so finally after being with them for 9 years we told them to shove it and signed up with Dish 2 years ago. So far very few problems, the dish even survived hurricane Ike. When power was restored it worked fine