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Review by Lenagainster 
UPDATED: 357 days ago
member for 4.8 years, 1404 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Silver Spring,Montgomery,MD
 Contract price not specified.
 "Lots of channels to choose from"
 "lose signal with heavy cloud cover, our receiver became sporatic"
 "adequate if nothing else available."
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(ratings below consensus)
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We started with DirecTV years ago when we had to purchase our own dish and receiver. Missed out on all the subsequent deals for free installation, free equipment, free service for the first few months. Going from commercial packed, free OTA TV to what we thought would be commercial free programming for under $30 per month. Just as many commercials, but we learned to live with it. Pixelization and loss of signal during a thunderstorm, and even heavy cloud cover, but we were forewarned and learned to live with it. The only thing we ever added to our "Choice" package was the local channels to save ourselves from switching between the dish and the antenna, but we watched our subscription increase from about $30 to $55. Not about to shell out more money for all new equipment so that we could watch different programs on each of the three TVs in the house, so we wired the other two as monitors and watched whatever was on the main TV, and learned to live with it.
We never ordered any 'On Demand' or special events, never had any problems with billing, which was automatically charged to a credit card.
Over the past year or so, we noticed that our receiver started acting flakey, It would randomly turn off and then after a few seconds, turn back on to another channel. It was annoying, but we learned to live with it. We just grabbed the remote and switched back to the channel we were watching. A bit more annoying when we were listening to a music channel playing through speakers in another room and it switched to a talk show. Not about to plop down another $70 for a new receiver. We lived with it.
We already had FiOS Internet and for about $5 more than we were paying for DirecTV to one television, we could get independent use of three TVs with FiOS TV, and not have to tolerate signal loss during a storm. So we switched. Let me say briefly that the picture quality on our old 32" CRT TV is definitely better with FiOS TV than with DirecTV. No more waiting five to ten seconds for the program description to show up in the guide. At some point, DirecTV's music was switched over to "XM Satellite", and our pleasant background music was interrupted constantly by an announcement that "this is XM Satellite Radio". What a downgrade!
When we called to cancel DirecTV, they were anxious to make a deal and lower my subscription fee. I had to insist that I was not interested in playing games with prices and just wanted to cancel. That call to DirecTV was the most frustrating time I ever had in dealing with them over the phone, as all previous contacts with them had been pleasant.
DirecTV, IMHO, is o.k. if nothing else is available. We have never had cable, so I can't compare that service, but for the short time we have had FiOS TV, it is definitely far superior to DirecTV.
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DIRECTV
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