   
|
||
 February 1, 2007 Dish vs. DirecTV: My Journey through the Quagmire For Christmas 2006, my wife and I gave ourselves a joint gift. We bought three flat-panel TVs to go along with the projector in the home theater, a Gefen switcher, and HDMI cables long enough to wire our whole house for high-definition video. We’d wanted to do this for a few years. Actually, we’d given each other the same present the year before, but I’m a dedicated HDMI fan -- as of Christmas 2005, an HDMI cable couldn’t be longer than 18’. We needed cables more than five times as long. Problem solved when Accell -- and, as of this writing, about a dozen other cable companies -- figured out how to push a 1080p signal through cables as long as 150’ and still get them certified HDMI. The cables arrived and our nightmares began. It wasn’t the cables’ fault -- they were perfect. The problems stemmed from DirecTV. The DirecTV Saga Regular readers know that I’m a big fan of the TiVo- and DirecTV-equipped HD-250 high-definition receiver and DVR. So, before putting cables in the walls, and using the longest HDMI cable, I hooked up a Toshiba HD LCD to test my connection. We watched the beautiful HD signal for about half an hour, at which point the screen went blank. I suspected the cable. I moved the TV to right behind the DirecTV box and used a 1m cable. Still nothing. I hooked the long cable up to my Oppo DVD player. Everything worked fine. Verdict: a problem with the HD-250. Here’s where things went nuts. I called DirecTV customer support and was immediately connected to India. In very poor English, "Joe" told me to do a hard reboot. Well, actually, he treated me like a four-year-old by trying to make me go step by painful step. I finally figured out that he didn’t know what an HDMI output was. When I asked to speak to his supervisor, "Joe" disconnected me. An accident, I’m sure. My next call also went to India. I endured more patronizing. (Is that a DirecTV policy?) Again I asked for a supervisor, and this time got one. I told her I wanted the problem fixed. She said that the problem was a known issue and that she would have to send me a new HD-250. And, by the way, in order to get the new one, I’d have to sign a two-year extension on my service contract. As a final insult, the replacement would be a rebuilt model -- they’d stopped making the TiVo several months before. Or I could order the new, TiVoless version, the DirecTV Plus, for $200 -- except that they were backordered and didn’t have a shipping date available. The new version has MPEG-4, and apparently DirecTV is going to stop supporting the HD-250’s TiVo functions. But no units of the new version were available, and in the meantime, my HD-250’s HDMI wasn’t working. The DirecTV supervisor kindly suggested that I use the component outputs. When I began to explain the benefits of HDMI, it became apparent that she, like "Joe," had no idea what HDMI was. I told her to not send me a replacement. Surprises at installation time Our next issue was to find someone to install our new cables. I can design a system and hook it up, so I didn’t want to hire a service to do those things. But someone other than me had to go up in the attic and figure out how to snake the cables through the walls. Our house is architecturally complex, with lots of opposing angles on the roofline, and various attic areas are accessible only via crawlspaces. We’d talked to builder friends about whom they were using for A/V installations, and they always said the same thing: "Well, we use Joe Blow, but he’s just the best of a bad lot. They’re all so busy, they rush through everything, and then they don’t have any time to come back and fix what they’ve screwed up." The thought of someone screwing up my walls and breaking some very expensive cables caused me to revert to a state of resting inertia. I couldn’t figure out whom to call. Here’s the odd thing. I’d recently had troubles with a Hewlett-Packard printer, and took it back to the new Best Buy down the road from us. When I didn’t get the help I expected -- and I wasn’t expecting much -- I asked for the manager. He listened carefully, apologized for the problem, led me over to the printer section, and handed me a brand-new printer. That bought my business. I started going in there and found that, instead of your normal big-box nonservice, the employees would come over, look me in the eye (a small thing, but rare in a store employee), and ask me if I needed any help. Then, instead of breezing off, they listened. I was impressed. Then, one day, I decided to check out the Magnolia Store inside the Best Buy. This is the chain’s attempt to go high end and high service. Best Buy bought the original Magnolia chain, a medium- to high-end, full-service audio and home-theater store, and set aside about 20% of the square footage in some of their best stores and created a store within a store. Not only was this an attempt to get a piece of the high-end market, it also lends a little class to their stores. They had nice equipment, such as MartinLogan and Pioneer Elite, and they, too, had an attitude of direct customer service. Then it dawned on me: I already know the manager will take care of a problem, and I like the attitude of the salespeople. So I cautiously asked if I could hire them to install equipment that I’d already bought. The answer was yes. We hired the Magnolia staff to install the HDMI cables in our house. This was a huge shift of direction for me. I also write about wine and restaurants, and normally you wouldn’t catch me dead covering chain restaurants or megacorp wines. To pick Best Buy over a local mom-and-pop place was a big deal. But I kept remembering the way the manager had handled my printer problem. I was impressed -- no, stunned -- at the quality, professionalism, care, knowledge, and courtesy of the Magnolia installers. Everything they did was handled with as much care as an artist would lavish on a piece of sculpture. At every step, they checked to make sure that I was happy. I knew that the installation had been done with the utmost professionalism and care. More fun with DirecTV Back to DirecTV. Remember that I’d told them not to send me another HD-250. I was considering switching to Dish Network or waiting for Time Warner, whose cable network has nearly reached my home. DirecTV sent me a new -- I mean, rebuilt -- HD-250 anyway. Frustrated, I decided to see if the HDMI worked. Straight out of the box, it didn’t. Worse, the rebuilders had omitted RCA jacks from the array of component outputs. When I called DirecTV to complain, they said the problem was the Toshiba, my installation, etc., etc. I told them to pick up the replacement HD-250 and not to send me another one. Two days later, I got another one. I refused delivery. Meanwhile, I’d been talking with a couple of DirecTV sellers, and asked about the transition to MPEG-4. Without hesitation, both told me that the new machines were so full of bugs that DirecTV had recalled them all and asked retailers to say that they were on backorder. No thanks. The last thing I needed was more run-ins with the morons at DirecTV customer service. With Time Warner still not in my area, I signed up with Dish. I figured that if I was going to lose TiVo anyway, I’d rather have any service than DirecTV. As it turned out, going from DirecTV to Dish was going from the bitter to the sweet. Dish to the rescue
Getting used to the new DVR system was a little harder. With TiVo, I didn’t even have to look at the manual. Getting used to new keystrokes and different terminology meant I kept the Dish manual near at hand for the first two days. But Dish has plenty of pluses. First, Dish can send a completely discrete signal to two different TVs, one HD and one SD. This is a huge boon for those of us who want to send something to the guest bedroom or den so that we can watch one thing while someone else watches another. Or (I love this) you can sacrifice the second output’s ability to show something different, and then have the DVR capable of recording two things from satellite and a third from a local channel, all while watching something you’ve already recorded. That’s one more than DirecTV.
My wife’s favorite Dish function is the 30-second advance button: One push and you’ve sailed through a commercial. The average break is four to six ads, so just push away, without having to worry about the back-and-forth on the fast-forward or fast-reverse buttons like you get with TiVo. Dish’s remote control is a thing of beauty compared to DirecTV’s. If you have good eyes, you can actually read each button’s function. The remote fits nicely in the hand, with a wave across the bottom that fits the fingers. I wish it was backlit -- well, the Source selector is -- but after a day or so of use, I could find everything by feel. Downsides? The biggest is that I can’t use the search function to look for actors and directors, as I could on the HD-250. While the Dish ViP622 will sort upcoming searches into themes, otherwise, all you can search for is titles. And it doesn’t actually record by title, but translates the title into a time and channel. If you want to record 60 Minutes and the football game runs over, you’ll get part of the game and part of 60 Minutes. The other big bugaboo comes courtesy of those merry pranksters at my local Fox affiliate. About three months ago, they installed a new router along the network feed, and now Dish receivers (as well as the new DirecTV receivers) are having dropout problems when they try to pull in an over-the-air hi-def signal. Fox says they’re working on it. I want my 24 in HD, so I hope they fix it soon. Game, set, match While I do miss the HD-250’s ability to search for actors and directors, I don’t miss DirecTV, and the Dish ViP622 has a number of strengths of its own. Dish wins. Bye-bye DirecTV. …Wes Marshall
|
||
|
It started with the installation.
Dish’s representative was on time, kept a clean workplace, was fast and courteous,
and had 15 years of experience. He even properly dressed the wires that DirecTV had left
asunder. Hooking up the ViP622 DVR was a cinch. Everything worked.
Delving into the system, I found a
picture-in-picture function that worked beautifully. Two football games on at the same
time? With one push of a button, you can go back and forth between them. Finding programs
using the guide is a snap, because you can set it to show three hours’ worth of nine
channels, all while still watching whatever you were watching before the search. And with
just a push of a button, you can cycle through either a guide that shows all channels,
just the ones you subscribe to, just the HD channels (locals included), or just the local
channels.