How many have worked a 622 deal already?

[iKramerica]

Waiter! Another glass of Dish Kool-Aid for the iKramerica guy at table #3. You can't miss him. He's the guy with the brown nose.

When people don't have anything worthwhile to say, they usually just try to silence others with ridicule...

So you think that Dish should give you a multi hundred dollar box for $49 without asking you to sign up for either an HD pack or pay a fee for the FREE technology they just gave you?

Nothing in life is free, pal. All equipment, be it from the cable company or from Dish or DirecTV is subsidized by your programming fees.

If people do what you propose, it means ALL of us pay more for our HD equipment and programming. Part of your fee for HD programming goes to pay for your HD receiver. If you don't buy a package, why should they not charge you a higher rental fee on that receiver?

As I said, I DON'T LIKE PAYING FEES, but I understand why Dish would have this policy. And when I get a 622, I won't be paying the fee because I'll be getting the HD package that doesn't require it. But, if in the future, I decide I don't watch the package enough, I will downgrade to the $6 option and pay that for the ability to watch and record HD content. 20 cents a day for this feature is not such a big deal, when the alternative is maybe paying a few hundred bucks more for the 622 to begin with...

 

[iKramerica]

So, in response to this thread, I wrote an email to the CEO@dishnetwork address last night and promptly received a call back from someone in the executive office. I politely explined my concerns and was amazed at the complete "f**k YOU" that I got from the CSR. He argued with me, cut me off and even told me that I was unreasonable and should subscrive to DirecTV.

You are unreasonable. Why? Because this is something they have been talking about for quite some time, again, since Charlie talked about the $1000 HD TV package. It is a very firm policy at Dish, and as I said, it is because the CONSUMER ELECTRONICS INDUSTRY is not putting out enough TVs with tuners onboard to begin with. They have had how many freaking years now? And they still charge $300 more per model, minimum, to add this chip in the unit. These TVs can already decode HD, they just need the ATSC tuner to give them the signal. Cost to the manufacturer is very little.

On the contrary, the Dish standard box can NOT decode HD. To make a standard box HD, it is not just a matter of adding a new chip, but instead building a new box with new firmware and new connectors and all that jazz. For Dish, it is more expensive.

So if you don't plan on buying HD from Dish, they aren't just going to provide you this more expensive box for no good reason. Since they can't stop you from buying one, they will charge you an extra fee to use it.

Your alternatives, of course, are to pay cable an extra fee for an HD box, pay DirecTV an extra fee for an HD box, buy a TV for a few hundred dollars MORE with an ATSC tuner in it, or buy an outboard tuner for a few hundred bucks.

You have NO cheaper alternative here, yet Dish is unreasonable because you want something for nothing?

 

[drsiebling]

You are unreasonable. Why? Because this is something they have been talking about for quite some time, again, since Charlie talked about the $1000 HD TV package. It is a very firm policy at Dish, and as I said, it is because the CONSUMER ELECTRONICS INDUSTRY is not putting out enough TVs with tuners onboard to begin with. They have had how many freaking years now? And they still charge $300 more per model, minimum, to add this chip in the unit. These TVs can already decode HD, they just need the ATSC tuner to give them the signal. Cost to the manufacturer is very little.

I think you might have me confused with someone else! All I'm asking dish for is the opportunity to take advantage of the $99 622 upgrade deal on Feb. 1st instead of having to wait until april. The point of my post is that I asked a simple question, made a simple request and was treated like a bastard by their CSR. Simply telling me no would have been sufficient, but they had to employ a csr who yelled and screamed at me for ten minutes. To be clear, I have a 942 that I paid $299 for a few months ago, and more HD equipment than most here. I've been a dish subscriber at the America's Everything level for years. I didn't think it was too much to ask to request a new box at the $99 rate. My post has nothing to do with getting free equipment for OTA signals...

Jeez...

 

[BlackHitachi]

Waiter! Another glass of Dish Kool-Aid for the iKramerica guy at table #3. You can't miss him. He's the guy with the brown nose.

LMAO help i am too much!!

 

[jsanders]

You have NO cheaper alternative here, yet Dish is unreasonable because you want something for nothing?

No offense, but you don't know what you are talking about iKramerica.

There are plenty of cheaper alternatives. I bought a new Samsung ATSC set top box for $138 on EBay for a friend.

DVRs? No problem-0, you can have a FREE DVR subscription!

The Sony DHG-HDD500 is a DVR that gets the guide data for free, over the air. 500GB hard drive even! That unit is a bit pricey, there are even cheaper alternatives!

Have you ever heard of the following?
MythTV
FreeVo
SageTV
BeyondTV

These are HTPC setups. In case you didn't know what that means, HTPC = Home Theater Personal Computer. Go to www.newegg.com. For a few hundred dollars, you can buy a DVR case with an Athalon 64 bit motherboard and 1GHz front side bus (FSB). They sell ATSC tuner cards for as low as $89. Want a three tuner DVR, just buy three of those cards and put them in. MythTV and SageTV can handle multiple tuners.

Check out this website of features and screenshots for MythTV:
http://www.mythtv.org/modules.php?name=MythFeatures

MythTV is a FREE linux system, that uses xmltv as a library. How does that work? It goes to a website like zap2it.com and parses the guide data from the web. Imagine that, free 14-day guide data! No subscription fee necessary! MythTV and SageTV have a lot more features than the 942 does, you can even archive material to the HD VCR via firewire, or add extra HD space at your leisure! The HD Tuner cards now can demodulate 8VSB and QAM. In other words, you can record HD OTA and HD Cable!

If you don't want to build one of those systems, or buy the Sony DVR, you can always buy the series 3 HD TiVO that is soon to be released. There will probably be a guide data subscription though.

I'm sorry that you are willing to pay those extra fees dish wants to shell out to you. It makes it harder for the rest of us when we complain about being ripped off! Dish needs to provide "added value" to what is already available for free. Many of us can have DVRs without fees to record OTA and cable. No reason for E* to charge us a premium to do that. They can charge for stuff we don't have, like the HD Pack and voom channels. If they keep hiking up the fees, people will look elsewhere!

 

[jsanders]

Has it occurred to anyone that Dish might not want to do the new channels as a preview? Oh, yeah, the gameplay channel is really great after previewing it! I've just got to subscribe to that one!!sadroll

 

[iKramerica]

Jsanders:

Do you understand the definition of the word "cheaper"?

You bought a used (right?) ATSC tuner for $138 off of ebay. Not sure how much you had to pay for shipping that cheaper option. And that is not where most people go. They go to Best Buy, Circuit City, etc.

$6 a month for 23 months is $138.

CC sells one for $230 plus tax.

That's equivalent to 38 months of the $6 fee.

You mention a very expensive Sony HDDVR. The 250GB version lists for $800 and sells at J&R for $550.

Dish has various deals from $99 to $299 for the Vip622, though you do pay a lease fee and HD fee (for OTA if you don't subscribe to HD content), for $11 a month. That's 23 months or so of the fee before you break even.

You also suggest spending a few hundred bucks on a HTPC, then another $89 on an ATSC tuner card. None of these things are free. All costs hundreds of dollars. None tune satellite or come with any premium content access. You have to still pay Dish or Cable for that.

The cheapest solution would be for TV manufacturers to put the ATSC chip and decoder on the same card as their NTSC decoders. It would cost them at most $15 extra. If that. But they charge $300 for this feature on most sets. $200 on some, depending on the value of the "rest" of the TV set. They judge how much they gouge you on this based on the total cost of the unit, rather than just including it in the price of all TVs like they should.

I said, and it is true, that if you want to ONLY TUNE ATSC HD, there are no real CHEAPER options out there than paying the $6 a month. That is assuming you ALREADY SUBSCRIBE TO DISH, which was the whole freaking point!

Are there other options? Yes. Are some about the same price? Sure. Do they include DBS service? No. Are there a whole bunch of cheaper options? No.

But if you want to point out how I am an idiot by showing me a whole bunch of equally or more expensive options, feel free! I don't know how it helps, but it might be useful to someone who wants to "stick it to those greedy Dish bastards" by spending hundreds of dollars elsewhere rather than $6 a month with Dish.

The complaint was made that the $6 fee is unfair (and not by drseibling, since he was asking for the $99 deal, not a waiver of the $6 fee, which wasn't made clear)

I said that Dish has a reasonable, if not welcome, policy that they aren't in the business of subsidizing OTA HD reception so that the CEI can shirk their FEDERALLY MANDATED RESPONSIBILITY to supply TVs with tuners in them.

I am not wrong. Dish has said that many times over the years in many ways in many forums. Do I agree? Not entirely, since a customer is still paying for a lot of services even if they don't subscribe to HD premiums, and it would be good will to not charge the fee (they don't on my 6000HD, after all). But I can at least UNDERSTAND why they have this policy going forward with the new hardware. It may not be what we want, but it's also not unfair.

 

[iKramerica]

I did find an HD pavillion TV for under $1000 that has a built in ATSC tuner. So they are out there. But they are few and far between, and in 2006, they should be as common as multi-brand remote controls.

 

[Smith P.]

I know its not out yet because there are only 14 622 Serial Numbers in the Data Stream for the 622. (Yes you can tell all the beta testing it has gone through with only 14 units being out there)

Somebody lied to you - there are 159 serial numbers.

 

[jsanders]

You only pay $6/mo on your Dish Network bill iKramerica? How did you manage that? I would love to subscribe for that, as it would take a long time to justify the cost of anything if I amortized against $6/mo!

Starting on Feb. 1, I have to pay $6/mo for an "access fee". I have to pay $6/mo for a DVR fee. I also have to pay a secondary DVR guide data fee of $6/mo. I also don't have a land line, and I have to pay $5/mo for that. I haven't bought any programming yet. The Stand alone HD Pack is $30/mo for channels that don't have much to watch, and, in the case of Voom, no new programming since it moved to Dish. It just keeps showing the same old stuff. Add up those fees, how much is it? $53/mo. Not much added value apart from an OTA setup.

Take that $53/mo against the $138 expense of an ATSC receiver. It pays for itself in a little over 2 1/2 months. Let's say I buy an HTPC receiver and spend $700 dollars, it pays for itself in 13 months. Oh, yea, you said you were going to lease an HD receiver. You have to buy at least the Bronze HD pack. That is $14/mo more, at $67/mo. Amortize that over the cost of the $700 HTPC and it pays for itself in 10.4 months. After that, Dish will cost more with only minimally added value in programming. The HTPC has and more features and no subscription fees. That is the free part and fits your definition.

That is what Dish needs to compete with. If they want more business, they have to offer added value at a reasonable price.

 

[DWS44]

Somebody lied to you - there are 159 serial numbers.

Hot Damn!!! From 14 to 159...we're rolling now!!!

That whopping supply ought to last them at least 5-10 seconds after midnight on 2/1!

 

[iKramerica]

You only pay $6/mo on your Dish Network bill iKramerica? How did you manage that...

What's your point?

THe complaint, I will repeat, was the "bogus" OTA $6 fee for those who want a NEW HD tuner but don't want to pay for it. That is all. It wasn't the total cost argument, or what have you. It was simply that Dish is now going to charge this fee on 211 and 622 receivers and other new HD receivers going forward if you don't subscribe to an HD package. If you don't want to pay the fee, the HD OTA tuner inside will be turned off.

I said that there aren't cheaper options to tune OTA elsewhere (without paying anyone for HD content). This of course assumes you still want some sort of premium programming.

You countered that by showing all these expensive ways to tune OTA. None of them seem to include the cost of non OTA programming. Are you trying to imply that buying that $550 sony HD recorder somehow comes with 180 channels at no cost? Of course you aren't. So why try to claim that I get my Dish programming for $6 a month...

You can pay for cable, but last time I checked they won't give you an HD box without a digital package that has an HD tier, and you also CAN'T TUNE OTA CHANNELS ON IT. (which is what the fee is for on Dish. Just for OTA without an HD package, something the cable company won't do for you. And I'm not talking the HD channels they retransmit, I'm talking the ATSC OTA tuner that the Dish boxes have that the cable boxes do not have.)

All the other options you show do tune ATSC OTA channels, but don't provide you other content. So you must still pay dish or cable or directv the same amount you would before, minus the $6 fee.

It would take 2-4 years to buy the outboard tuners rather than paying the $6 fee. For the Sony unit? It would take 2 years to break even on that rather than pay Dish $299+$11 a month (remember, you still have to pay the receiver rental fee even with the Sony, unless you are getting your SD content from somewhere besides Cable, Dish, etc.)

The PVR fee is charged by many cable companies. So is the box rental fee. They charge a remote fee. Etc. Monthly equipment fee with cable is equal or higher than with dish even with that extra $6, BUT they don't however require you to pay $300 for an HD PVR up front. So, that is a cheaper option for PVR, but again, they don't offer an OTA HD tuner, which is what the $6 is for. And they won't give you the HD box without an HD tier of some kind, which Dish WILL DO, as long as you pay them the $6 extra fee.

So, unless you are somehow getting your cable/sat content for free with those other options, the only additional fee we are talking about is $6 for HD, or $11 for HD+PVR.

 

[iKramerica]

News from the DEAL FRONT:

My contact checked with a few people.

They are not going to make any deals for anyone outside of those who own 921/942 (or lease). My contact talked to a few people and they are being inundated by everyone who is pissed about the cost of $300 for something they won't ever own. They don't care. That's pretty much the size of it.

The only deals they will do are the DIU, and that seems to be switching to an 18 month from 12 month.

They don't care if you've been there for 9 months or 9 years, if you rent 1 311 or own 5 $500+ receivers. $299 for all - any Dish it up discounts.

I responded that I am forced to explore all my options, that I feal that people who own 721+6000/811 should be treated the same ($99), and thanked her for her help.

So, if anyone does get a deal, they should post it here, since that would show Dish is lying.

But it sounds like they aren't going to budge for now.

 

[jsanders]

iKramerica, you're just not worth the effort to continue that discussion.

 

[jsanders]

Looks like the first 622s are available on EBay right now for anyone that wants one. :yikes

http://search.ebay.com/search/searc...os=ZIP/Postal&ftrt=1&ftrv=1&saprclo=&saprchi=

 

[Smith P.]

I'm wondering what that ppl who will buy the Vip622 at eBay will see ?
There are no spooling software for the receivers, only BETA [ACP1] for little batch: 159 of them.

 

[jsanders]

Looks like a 622 just showed up with a "Buy it Now" price of $585. He says he works for Dish Network. I wonder if it is legitimate. If anyone wants their special "deal", this might be it for you.

 

[riffjim4069]

Looks like a scam...priced too low, the specs are wrong, talks about qualifying unqualifed customers.

 

[Smith P.]

Update.
As for today, Dish spooling new beta software for Vip622 [ACR1] and increased the number of beta receivers up to 313.

 

[jcrandall]

Good sign that they are at least on the way off the assembly line. Thats from 8 to 150 to 300 in a few days...