just started my 24th year with Dish/ Echostar.... and I just received my 2 year guarantee and PCO in December.. saving me a bit over $25 a month...
Loyal Dish customer longevity
- Thread starter Mikeymax
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Ummm...how?Do you mean all these posters got on the phone and called Dish solely for the purpose of establishing how long they had been a customer?I was hoping someone would point out exactly where on Dish's site such information resides as I couldn't find it.
NASA has never been in HD on DISH.
The first two channels that were carried in HD were HBO and SHOWTIME.
back on topic 22 years here.
Got DISH when a friend told me about it and that they carried NASA TV.
Sorry but I disagree. It was absolutely in HD and was on the 61.5 Dish.
Edit: my apologies because you're right. What I initially received was the demo channel but it had mostly space walks which is why I mistakingly thought it was NASA. It was the first and only HDTV channel they offered when I had it installed.
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I don't remember that demo channel. I do remember the fish tank demo, though. I don't remember if it was HD, though.
Yes I did call them. I wanted to check my memory's health. I was thinking could it be 25 years and sure enough hit 25th aniversary 4 months ago...
Back in analog days, color was God--awful on my cable TV (Media General now Cox) and OTA as well, because it changed from channel to channel and often from program to program. Green faces: not good! I bought a Sylvania which had a great innovation: automatic color correction that took anything that looked like a flesh tone and made it flesh tone. Stereo, too.
IIRC, Dish has always been digital, and the colors were rock solid. No snow either.
I'm one of the longer customers coming up on 25 years continuous service. Service has been reliable from day one to today. Service outages have been rare, so rare I would say a year of Cable has more outages than all my nearly 25 with DISH.
Over the years they have had some excellent receivers and couple of duds but certainly overall their receivers have been ahead of the pack.
With all he discounts I get and the new equipment pricing I am easily getting the best cost for what I have compared to even the specials I keep getting mailings for Spectrum or Frontier. Certainly less than Direct TV.
At one time the losing channels over disputes was a big deal (to me) but I'm over it. They mostly come back and if not for the couple of shows I may really want to see I can pay every so often to watch them if needed online now but that has yet to happen. And I still enjoy having the Superstations.
The two things that I most fondly remember is having two sets of Distants and Charlie Chats. However if you know how to do it Locast can give you any market they carry.
Over the years they have had some excellent receivers and couple of duds but certainly overall their receivers have been ahead of the pack.
With all he discounts I get and the new equipment pricing I am easily getting the best cost for what I have compared to even the specials I keep getting mailings for Spectrum or Frontier. Certainly less than Direct TV.
At one time the losing channels over disputes was a big deal (to me) but I'm over it. They mostly come back and if not for the couple of shows I may really want to see I can pay every so often to watch them if needed online now but that has yet to happen. And I still enjoy having the Superstations.
The two things that I most fondly remember is having two sets of Distants and Charlie Chats. However if you know how to do it Locast can give you any market they carry.
October 2020? Were they in business in October 1995? I believe it was around March 1996 when the service started?
We bought our ECHOSTAR/DISH kit around Thanksgiving 1995 as a Christmas gift to ourselves. It sure seems as though we had programming before March 1996?
Programming didn’t start till March of 1996. I paid 19.99 a month for Dish Top 40 programming package. At the time I had a Directv system as well I purchased at Lowe’s for 699.99 for a single LNB system. I subbed to USSB as well. They gave the 1st month of the package free for the first month. It had the channels of HBO,max,showtime,encore and all the mtv/nick,lifetime suite of channels. I also had a 12ft Paraclypse Cband dish with a Toshiba Trx 80 Satellite system with a pink Videocipher VCRS module! Man those were the good old days!!
NTSC...Never Twice the Same Color
Been with Dish for 12 years after 8 with DirecTV. Left DirecTV because we were not able to receive HD programming because of LOS issues. As soon as Dish lit up the EA we jumped ship. We were one of the first EA installations in our area according to the tech that installed our original system (a 722k plus a 211k receiver). At first we had to have two dishes to hit the 61 and 72 sats. When we upgraded to a Hopper a couple of years ago we went to a single dish.
We recently had Charter-Spectrum run fiber on our property line as part of a government subsidized rural broadband initiative. We now have 1gig internet service but will stick with Dish for TV for now, primarily for locals. We are deep in a valley so OTA reception is a no-go.
We recently had Charter-Spectrum run fiber on our property line as part of a government subsidized rural broadband initiative. We now have 1gig internet service but will stick with Dish for TV for now, primarily for locals. We are deep in a valley so OTA reception is a no-go.
I've got a photo of my installed single LNB dish taken on October 9, 1996. I remember getting the DISH kit and self-installing it when there was only the 119 satellite. Back in those early days I re-pointed to the sats at 61 and 148 after they were launched just to see if I could get them. My first receiver was not DISH, but I don't remember the brand.
I was a non-stop Dish customer since 1996. I was pissed at our cable company because our local Fox affiliate made a huge deal about having surround sound, so I went out and got a surround sound receiver so I could watch X-files in surround sound only to find out that the cable company was not passing through the surround sound! So I got Dish and never looked back through 5 houses and 2 states.
Absolutely loved Dish Network and refused to go with the competition. Dish receivers and technology were always so much better. I got the original WebTV PVR (wasn't called a DVR then) when it first came out (I had no idea how much it would revolutionize how we watched TV!).
At one point the cable company gave me a full year's worth of cable and a DVR for free. I kept my Dish at the same time and after one sample of the cable company's DVR I hardly ever switched the thing back on. It was far worse than the first Dish DVRs I had 10 years earlier!
I watched Charlie Chat and the Tech Chat religiously. I even won a coffee mug on the Tech Chat (sadly I dropped it and it broke, but by that time the log was worn off anyway).
I loved how Charlie would never give in to content providers' endless demands for more money. For years my Dish bill was very affordable and gave me some real options to choose the channels that I wanted.
But to be honest, eventually the costs kept going up. Monthly locals fee; monthly DVR fee (that one really irked me) and software updates that started to make my beloved DVR not quite as nice: removal of the 4X fast forward mode (useful for watching certain events in the Olympics) and just increasing sluggishness--I think they were trying to pack too much stuff into old hardware. Sluggishness (or lack thereof) was one of the hallmarks of Dish DVRs, and now their DVRs were starting to act as slow as the competition. I tried several times to get a Hopper 3 in the hopes that it had newer hardware that was more responsive, but even after 23 years of continuous service they couldn't see fit to upgrade me.
I might have left Dish sooner had I not been pretty much tied to their system because of all my old DVR recordings, but eventually the cost just became too much. I put my Dish on a 9 month pause (the longest they would allow) so I could finally get through most of my DVR backlog and when I came off pause I canceled about a year ago after about 24 years of service.
Granted, there is no great alternative to Dish. I use YouTubeTV now, but their prices have almost doubled since I first signed up, which is infuriating, and they have lost a few channels that we watch. Obviously the cloud DVR has advantages and disadvantages. It generally works, but certainly not as good as a local DVR and definitely not as good as the Dish DVR. And now the trend appears to be every media outlet has their own streaming service that we'll have to subscribe to anyway.
I'm afraid the golden age of aggregated media content is behind us. It was good while it lasted.
Absolutely loved Dish Network and refused to go with the competition. Dish receivers and technology were always so much better. I got the original WebTV PVR (wasn't called a DVR then) when it first came out (I had no idea how much it would revolutionize how we watched TV!).
At one point the cable company gave me a full year's worth of cable and a DVR for free. I kept my Dish at the same time and after one sample of the cable company's DVR I hardly ever switched the thing back on. It was far worse than the first Dish DVRs I had 10 years earlier!
I watched Charlie Chat and the Tech Chat religiously. I even won a coffee mug on the Tech Chat (sadly I dropped it and it broke, but by that time the log was worn off anyway).
I loved how Charlie would never give in to content providers' endless demands for more money. For years my Dish bill was very affordable and gave me some real options to choose the channels that I wanted.
But to be honest, eventually the costs kept going up. Monthly locals fee; monthly DVR fee (that one really irked me) and software updates that started to make my beloved DVR not quite as nice: removal of the 4X fast forward mode (useful for watching certain events in the Olympics) and just increasing sluggishness--I think they were trying to pack too much stuff into old hardware. Sluggishness (or lack thereof) was one of the hallmarks of Dish DVRs, and now their DVRs were starting to act as slow as the competition. I tried several times to get a Hopper 3 in the hopes that it had newer hardware that was more responsive, but even after 23 years of continuous service they couldn't see fit to upgrade me.
I might have left Dish sooner had I not been pretty much tied to their system because of all my old DVR recordings, but eventually the cost just became too much. I put my Dish on a 9 month pause (the longest they would allow) so I could finally get through most of my DVR backlog and when I came off pause I canceled about a year ago after about 24 years of service.
Granted, there is no great alternative to Dish. I use YouTubeTV now, but their prices have almost doubled since I first signed up, which is infuriating, and they have lost a few channels that we watch. Obviously the cloud DVR has advantages and disadvantages. It generally works, but certainly not as good as a local DVR and definitely not as good as the Dish DVR. And now the trend appears to be every media outlet has their own streaming service that we'll have to subscribe to anyway.
I'm afraid the golden age of aggregated media content is behind us. It was good while it lasted.
Be Careful!I was a non-stop Dish customer since 1996. I was pissed at our cable company because our local Fox affiliate made a huge deal about having surround sound, so I went out and got a surround sound receiver so I could watch X-files in surround sound only to find out that the cable company was not passing through the surround sound! So I got Dish and never looked back through 5 houses and 2 states.
Absolutely loved Dish Network and refused to go with the competition. Dish receivers and technology were always so much better. I got the original WebTV PVR (wasn't called a DVR then) when it first came out (I had no idea how much it would revolutionize how we watched TV!).
At one point the cable company gave me a full year's worth of cable and a DVR for free. I kept my Dish at the same time and after one sample of the cable company's DVR I hardly ever switched the thing back on. It was far worse than the first Dish DVRs I had 10 years earlier!
I watched Charlie Chat and the Tech Chat religiously. I even won a coffee mug on the Tech Chat (sadly I dropped it and it broke, but by that time the log was worn off anyway).
I loved how Charlie would never give in to content providers' endless demands for more money. For years my Dish bill was very affordable and gave me some real options to choose the channels that I wanted.
But to be honest, eventually the costs kept going up. Monthly locals fee; monthly DVR fee (that one really irked me) and software updates that started to make my beloved DVR not quite as nice: removal of the 4X fast forward mode (useful for watching certain events in the Olympics) and just increasing sluggishness--I think they were trying to pack too much stuff into old hardware. Sluggishness (or lack thereof) was one of the hallmarks of Dish DVRs, and now their DVRs were starting to act as slow as the competition. I tried several times to get a Hopper 3 in the hopes that it had newer hardware that was more responsive, but even after 23 years of continuous service they couldn't see fit to upgrade me.
I might have left Dish sooner had I not been pretty much tied to their system because of all my old DVR recordings, but eventually the cost just became too much. I put my Dish on a 9 month pause (the longest they would allow) so I could finally get through most of my DVR backlog and when I came off pause I canceled about a year ago after about 24 years of service.
Granted, there is no great alternative to Dish. I use YouTubeTV now, but their prices have almost doubled since I first signed up, which is infuriating, and they have lost a few channels that we watch. Obviously the cloud DVR has advantages and disadvantages. It generally works, but certainly not as good as a local DVR and definitely not as good as the Dish DVR. And now the trend appears to be every media outlet has their own streaming service that we'll have to subscribe to anyway.
I'm afraid the golden age of aggregated media content is behind us. It was good while it lasted.
Wow - reading all these years of having Dish makes me feel like the young one! I got Dish in November 2009, so just over 11 years, and I have been thrilled with the service over the years. I did consider DirecTV at one point for Sunday Ticket, but it wasn't enough to make me want to switch. I can receive all my locals and Dish allowing me to drop them is a huge plus. Hardware is top notch compared to some friends who have other services. I love my VIP211k.
The only two issues that have come up in my household with Dish is the fact that there is no more NBC Sports Chicago to watch the Bulls, and Disney XD is not in HD. Granted, I can do Disney XD in HD through Roku and logging in with my Dish credentials, so it isn't the end of the world. Overall I have been very happy with Dish.
The only two issues that have come up in my household with Dish is the fact that there is no more NBC Sports Chicago to watch the Bulls, and Disney XD is not in HD. Granted, I can do Disney XD in HD through Roku and logging in with my Dish credentials, so it isn't the end of the world. Overall I have been very happy with Dish.
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