Cancellation issues, what ifs, and keeping my recorded content
- Thread starter Mark609
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Is it? Dish is broadcasting a signal based on the rights developed in contracts they have with various channel providers. These rights most likely do not include permanent licenses to any single program. You are complaining Dish isn't giving you permanent access to something Dish isn't authorized to give permanent access for.Exactly.
This is a Dish thing, pure and simple.
Actually I think Dish making External Drives free of charge for the 722 was a no brainer because it most certainly creates a strong retention tool. And there isn't anything wrong with that.As mentioned, it's a strong arm retention tool, or extortion if you will. "You want to watch that content you download recently? Then keep paying the man."
Customer service and retail are some of the worst jobs ever. They never get paid enough since they can easily be replaced and they take the most crap from people. I truly think that every person should be required to work one of these jobs for a year at least once in their lives just so they can have a better understanding of what it's like.
Think of any other company and do the same google search and see what you find. There are always complaints for every company online.
Having proprietary hardware/software isn't new in ANY business. Look at Microsoft Office. You create a Word document on computer 'A'. For quite a long time, if you didn't have Word on computer 'B', you couldn't read the document. Then 3rd party companies figured out how to read the Word files.
People haven't figured out how to read Dish's files yet.
People haven't figured out how to read Dish's files yet.
You have to forgive Mark609 for being a total tool to just about everyone, he's having a hard time trying to figure out why you can't use a service you no longer are paying for. In the mean time all the Cordillera Communications own affiliates in 7 states have gone dark over on DIRECT because, unlike DISH, DIRECT NEVER have retransmission disputes.
Makes perfect sense - as you say, the channel owners just want us to watch the programming and not care who we watch it from. In fact, they'd probably be in favor of it being available "forever" !
I think we can rule out any regulations as you aren't likely to have one set of rules for one entity and different rules for another.
Folks, please keep comments about the topic and not about the other members.
I don't know of any cable company that allows you to watch your recorded content on their DVRs when service is suspended or canceled.
I don't know of any cable company that allows you to watch your recorded content on their DVRs when service is suspended or canceled.
I'll bet the same situation applies that seems to work with Dish -- disconnect the cable before you cancel. It could at least improve your odds of it working. On the other hand, maybe cable systems require frequent or constant check-ins. Hmmm, how about this ? If there's a cable outage, are you able to watch recordings ?
It's been my experience that you can still access recordings on a deactivated receiver for a few days before the feature is shut down. When I upgraded from the 922 to the Hopper I forgot to transfer shows to my EHD before deactivating the 922. I was able to spend two days transferring recordings before I lost the DVR features.
When Ike came through and killed power for three days and cable for 5 days in our area in 2009 I not able to see the DVR until cable service was restored. But I am not sure about if only cable goes out for more than a day.
This is a common misunderstanding. Many prospective TiVo buyers assume that they can do whatever they want with whatever they record but that's simply not the case. TiVos aren't magically exempt from copy flags and other DRM limitations.
True, but terminating service with a cable company and going OTA does not kill the cable company recordings off your TiVo. Cable channels can be marked do not copy which keeps you from moving it from one TiVo to another.
The most likely explanation to all of this is while various providers (cable, IPTV, satellite, etc.) companies have access to do things like set flags on the programs that are recorded on devices like Tivos they have far more control over boxes that they sell/lease and are for use on their systems only since they typically have OS level control. As such it's pretty easy for them to do things like disable all playback of recorded content on these units. Whether or not it'd be possible, or if Tivo would even comply, for them to tell Tivo that a subscriber has discontinued service and to disable playback of all recordings made up to a certain date I do not know. Not sure if it's even been tried although I have to wonder if some providers and program distributors have talked to Tivo about it.
Who said anything about wanting their (sorry) service anymore? I could care less about their service, we've seen what that's all about. Since reading comprehension isn't your strongest suit I'll reiterate - I want to drop their on and off service but keep what I paid for regarding recorded content. I also paid for the box, I paid for the hard drive that's in it. Got it?
Seems to me we're witnessing a "hurray for me, screw you" game.
Guess I better return those 33 DVD BluRay movies sitting there in my theater cabinet too, eh?
Mark, now that we've all sat thru 4 pages of minutiae about your relatively SIMPLE question... 
I DO still truly believe that you WILL be able to watch shows already on the (internal) HDD...provided you disco the SAT cable BEFORE you shut it off.
That being said, if it happens that you can't...& you DO need to copy some things off later, you could always reactivate your receiver under the Welcome Pack for a short time; while it is $20/month, at least it's cheaper than having to activate a full-blown pkg, & this presumably would be for a very short period of time for you to copy to another media.
I DO still truly believe that you WILL be able to watch shows already on the (internal) HDD...provided you disco the SAT cable BEFORE you shut it off.
That being said, if it happens that you can't...& you DO need to copy some things off later, you could always reactivate your receiver under the Welcome Pack for a short time; while it is $20/month, at least it's cheaper than having to activate a full-blown pkg, & this presumably would be for a very short period of time for you to copy to another media.
Can't he put his account on pause for a $5 or so a month and have access to the internal drive still? That'd allow him enough time to get stuff off the drive... assuming it is mostly HD and not SD which would mean a long time to rip it all.
You are comparing apples with oranges and saying the store ripped you off because that orange doesn't taste like an apple.
You do realize that the rights you purchase to view programming via sub'ing to a cable/Sat company are not the exact same as when you buy a DVD or Blu-Ray, right?
You are comparing apples with oranges and saying the store ripped you off because that orange doesn't taste like an apple.
A few points:
1) You're currently paying for DVR service, correct? Terminating your relationship with Dish means you're not longer paying for DVR service and that's what you want to continue to access. I think that was the point the poster you quoted was trying to make.
2) Because of the DMCA and DRM, there's no legal way for you to bypass the encryption and transfer your DVR content to another computer for playback or storage. There are supposedly Linux programs that will allow for this, but I believe discussing them would violate the no hack talk rule on this forum. The only way to keep things would be via analogue output to a DVD recorder or VCR.
3) As for your BluRay comment, I think a more accurate analogy would be that you wanted to rip the BluRays to a computer to then watch them on another device. Content owners don't would argue that this is illegal and that you should have to pay separately for digital rights to watch the content without the disk; that the license that comes with the disk is only to watch the content under certain limited conditions. Similarly, you may own the Receiver and the hard drive, but not necessarily the right to watched the licensed content on it outside of a service agreement with Dish. This may be Dish's doing or it could very well be spelled out in their contracts with the content owners. I don't think anyone here could say for certain. As for why Tivo is different, to my knowledge they have no contracts with content providers and thereby could be avoiding any such limitations. Since cable companies legally have to provide cablecards that are compatible with Tivos, I'm not sure there are necessarily even contracts there that could limit how Tivo treats the content after the underlying service is terminated.
These points aside, I think DVR recordings are a huge retention tools. I have several hard drives filled with content, and would be loathe to part with Dish and lose them. That said, if the service ever really pissed me off, I would either bite the bullet and forgo the saved content, or drop to the lowest available package so that I could continue my access.
With my penchant for keeping everything I ever recorded and a stack of 14 EHDs, I can testify to how strong is this as a retention tool. I am very much regretting that I didn't come up with a better method years ago and took the convenient easy path.
