So as some of you may know, when I moved into my house I made the switch from Comcast to Dish Network. Pricing is much better, high def seems to be in higher quality, and the 2 room DVR has been a great experience. I've been very happy so far. In the worst storms we've maintained our regular TV, but have lost High Def. To some this may be an issue...but when I was in the apartment complex and had Comcast, we were accidentally unplugged 9 times. 9. And each time it was at least a day turn around (but whoopee, they gave a 1 day credit!) until I had my cable.
Well, on Black Friday I picked up a 500 GB Western Digital USB hard drive because a) it was $100 and b) Dish now allows you to hook up a USB drive to your DVR for more storage. Why not, right? So when I hook it up and try to transfer TV shows to it ( a few Christmas specials my wife wants to keep), I get told I have to activate it for that functionality.
I call in thinking it's a non-issue...but I should have known better. To be able to do this Dish Network requires....$40. Granted it's not a ton of money, but a one time fee of $40 bucks to allow me to hook up a USB hard drive (that I bought) to a DVR (that I pay for) is ridiculous.
That's just pathetic. That's something Comcast would do.
5 comments:
$40 bucks is a bit much; but like you said; you're far better off then being a slave on the Comcast ship.
I'm lucky enough not to have Comcast as my provider.
I think the direction I will go when I'm ready to expand my DVR space and capability is Tivo. If I'm correct I can add more HD space later. Am I right?
On the other hand, I do not have a land line phone. They wanted to charge me an additional $5/month to NOT hook up my system to their interactive system. HRM?!?!?
Only the threat of moving to DirecTV instead got me any traction with them.
I'm a longtime DirecTV customer, and we're about to plunge into the HD DVR world. It's much more expensive than what you paid. I have to pay $300 just for the box. I can add an external drive for free, but I think you will have paid less in the long run.
DTV is the only way I'm assured to get my weekly buzzkill by Da Bears.
Wow Mike... Don't they allow you to buy third party equipment to work with DirecTV?
I'm pretty sure I read a TiVO rule that says dish & cable companies are REQUIRED to support TiVO and can do so by programing some sort of card that goes into your Tivo System instantly making it hooked up to whatever you subscribe to.
Here's that page:
http://tivo3.instancy.com/TiVoPDF/TiVo%20Series2%20DVR%20Start%20Here%20(2003).pdf
Sorry, it's a PDF and you have to read through it; but it pretty well states that Dish, DirectTV, and all Cable Channels MUST comply with this rule and allow users to pick alternate forms of DVR's which can be set up to work with any system (descramblers/whatever) DirectTV would just have to issue you a card that you'd slip in.
I love my Tivo. Everyone should look into it. As long as you have a computer hooked up to the same network as the tivo box, just transfer your recordings to the computer and that's that. Of course, I'm not sure everyone would care about the monthly service from Tivo. It may be worth looking into the HD box if your company uses cablecards though. I think if you choose cablecard with Comcast and a couple others, you get one cablecard with your monthly service and additional ones are only 2 or 3 bucks a month.
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