One Month of Dish Network: A Review

After having both Comcast and DirecTV come out to my tree-surrounded apartment and tell me they could do nothing to help me receive cable, I called up Dish Network. The previous tenant had a dish installed in the backyard and I figured the angle of the satellite was good enough to reach the southern sky.

The Dish Network installation was a little stressful, they had originally quoted me on a Sunday morning from 8-noon, and the day before, they called me and gave me a new installation window: noon to 5 p.m. Luckily, the cable guy showed up at about 12:30 so it wasn't like my whole day was shot. The installation took about an hour for hooking up 2 televisions, the satellite and the obstacles didn't scare him off like it did DirecTV.

Pros, So Far:
1. The coolest thing about the installation is that it only required one receiver for 2 TVs. Dish Network has a receiver that splits off into 2 coaxial cable strands, so you can watch 2 different things in 2 different rooms and only needing one receiver.

2. The onscreen guide on the Dish Network is much more intuitive than previous digital versions I've experienced. I used to have Comcast Digital Cable and when you hit the channel guide/preview button, it would take about 2 seconds of response time for the screen to appear. Likewise, the channels would have that delay so you really couldn't do any rapidfire scanning.

3. The reception of the channels is amazing. Of course, I haven't encountered any major wind storm yet, but my recollection of the Comcast Digital Cable was a lot of hurky-jerky pixellation and blue screen of death during vital parts of a movie. I have yet to hit a bump in the road with Dish Network.

4. Availabilty of channels is not bad. I opted for the cheapo special, America's Top 100. All I wanted was Turner Classic, IFC, GameShow Network, and ESPNews. I could really care less about the other channels. Do I really need 2 QVCs? However, within the last month, they were doing a free preview of the Starz channels, so it offered the chance to see some free movies. I'm assuming they do free previews of the channels you never ordered a lot.