TiVo is what made our family switch from Dish Network to DIRECTV. It also let my mom to switch, but unfortunately she swich too late and didn’t get the TiVo. Instead she got a far inferior DVR produced by DIRECTV.  Now there may be hope for better TV on the horizon!

First of all there was the DVR. I think with time all DVR systems continue to improve, but what I miss most about my Dish DVR is the ability to skip ahead 30 seconds. This allowed me to press the skip button approximately 4 times and jump through all the commercials. With my current DVR, I have not other option but to fast forward through them. Even at the fastest speed it is not as fast as pressing the “jump ahead” button 4 times. Also, at the fastest speed I have to pay close attention to the scenes or I can easily go past the point I wanted to start watching again.

The second thing I miss most is the display guide. Obviously DIRECTV has a display guide, but I prefer Dish Networks. I still own the 25” TV we purchased at Costco with money we were given at our wedding nearly 7 years ago. Dish Network has a big, easy to read guide. DIRECTV is much more fancy – especially on our TiVo system. Because of this it is much slower and harder to read on our archaic TV.

My third issue always deals with the display guide. On Dish Network, we could easily see from the guide which channels we did not subscribe to. They appeared in red. I don’t know why DIRECTV doesn’t have this feature. You can select the option to only see the channels you subscribe to, but from my experience this doesn’t work very well and you still see way too many channels you don’t want to see. If you don’t have the channel, you don’t really have a way of knowing just from the guide display.

And while I’m still on the topic of the guide, let me bring up another complaint. With our Dish Network system, my wife and I could have our own custom lists of the channels we like to watch most. It was easy to set up and easy to see what list you were on, and very easy to switch between those lists. It seems DIRECTV only has one custom list which we use to filter out all the pay per view and other channels we don’t get or never watch (like all those shopping channels). Plus, changing between viewing all, viewing subscribed, or viewing your custom list is a major ordeal of going into the setup menu and drilling down to the right option. With Dish Network’s system, you just press the guide button again to switch between these lists.

So with everything in life, we can’t have it all. But these four points along with the fact the Dish Network can be owned at a cheaper price make it an appealing choice for much of the TV watching population.

To compare Dish Network and DIRECTV side-by-side visit www.Direct-vs-Dish.com

[tags]Dish Network, DIRECTV, Direct TV, TV, Television, Cable, DVR, Dish, TiVo[/tags]

I’m curious though, has anyone here tried both? What do you like and dislike about the two?