So, I didn't read through all of this thread, but I had heard about the subscriber loss. I thought I'd add my cancellation experience from the other day, since it was baffling to this thread in case it has any relevancy. Pardon me in advance if it does not. Maybe a DIRT team member will have interest to investigate it. I would think in the current atmosphere of things and numbers like those, they would be very interested in what their retention team is or is not doing.
Over the past year I had been mulling over what to do going forward when our contract expired last month. In today's competitive market, with increasing data caps, Google Fibre coming to our area soon, new streaming services, etc I couldn't ignore the possibilities that open up. When you place Dish with their archaic sub model of increasing prices,
constant carrier war outages and down-scaled resolution against the competition, staying with them became harder and harder to think about by the day. Comcast just took our data caps from 300gb to 1tb per month. Doing something like PS Vue and HBO Now at $60/mo (combined) to replace our America Top 250, Plus HBO on an aging Hopper 2k, Super Joey, +2 Joey system at $176/mo suddenly was a no brainer. If I went with my original out of contract plan, to change my LNB, buy a Hopper 3 and 2 4K Joeys, I would have most likely saved nothing and still been paying around $2112 per year. PSVue on the other hand gives me what I want in channels, and modern DVR storage in the cloud system that can not botch missed shows due to rain fade, plus I can turn HBO Now on/off as needed (GoT season) and be at most $720 if I did run HBO Now full time.
I called Dish to discuss exiting. No problem she said, we'll send you boxes, ship back the Hopper and Joey system.
Have a nice day, call ended. It literally took 5 minutes max! I had even opened the call in a super passive, "Hey, I'm thinking about cancelling, I'm not sure I can justify the current cost any more and our equipment is ancient"... There were no offers, aggressive win back tactics or shenanigans, nothing. It happened so fast, I was shocked and went through the rest of the day in disbelief. Was I secretly hoping they'd come through with some reason for me to stay, and upgrade equipment? Sorta, but not really, because I want to own my equipment and end paying receiver fee's. Cable companies gave up on box and modem fee's on owned equipment, Dish and D* (if they still do it) should do the same because it's BS. Even if those fee's go away, I also can't see paying more than $100/mo at this point and not getting what I want, full time and at full resolution.
PS Vue has been nothing short of amazing with regards to picture quality in comparison. When you have 3 real 4K TV's like a 75X940D, 65X930D, and a 55X930C you can not imagine until you've lived with them just how bad Dish looks in comparison to anything else that is truly native 1080, etc. A wise person once told me, the most important thing behind the scalers on these 'super' TV's is, garbage in, garbage amplified, really BIG garbage out, and that is exactly what I just figured out first hand having made the switch. Vue has a few little usage bugs to work through (their guide is super weird to get used to), but overall we've been driving the service hard for a month now just to make up our minds.
In the end, it's goodbye Dish for now, I've unfortunately added to your subscriber woes. And for those of you who may remember me from other discussions, I do still have my Wally and 211K in my RV. We'll experiment with Vue on the go, but if needed we can do the monthly pay-as-you-go thing for RV's there if nothing else to satisfy any withdrawals.