originally posted august 14, 2005

Dish Off!

When I made the decision to move earlier this year, I also made the decision to go high-definition. In so doing I also decided to drop Comcast for Dish Network. Now I'm willing to eat hundreds of dollars in equipment and early-termination fees to come crawling back. Comcast, meanwhile, is rolling out the red carpet to welcome me back as a customer with a discount deal that nearly cancels out all the fees.

Chinese TV Versus American Sports

Despite the presence of a DirecTV satellite dish on the roof of my new home, I chose Dish because they had more high-definition programming. After Dish bought the now-defunct all-HD provider Voom, Dish absorbed ten of Voom's channels into its own lineup as a $5-per-month option. To even make myself eligible to receive Voom channels, I requested that Dish install a free second satellite dish on the roof (under the guise that I wanted WPCB-TV, a local religious station, which is available on different satellite than other Pittsburgh locals).

Upon looking through the program guide, I found nothing but simple narrowcasting on the "Voom Originals": channels like "Guy TV" and "Monster TV" promised a very focused set of HD programming they licensed from other sources. Sadly, of the five HDTV channels included in the standard HD package, the only one I cared to watch was ESPNHD. Two of the channels, HDNet and HDNet Movies, show any content they can grab in high definition.

There are these little things called "over-the-air" channels such as CBS, ABC, NBC, etc. Station call letters are followed by -DT for digital signals (which can carry HDTV) versus -TV for analog signals. Dish Network doesn't carry local channels in high definition. This means that I can watch all the two-star movies and travel documentaries I like in HDTV with Dish Network, but to watch Monday Night Football I need an antenna. A big antenna. I tried one of those little $60 antennas you clamp onto the dish, but it doesn't receive WTAE-DT, the local ABC affiliate's digital channel, at all. Antennaweb said I need a Medium Directional Antenna like this $85 number. According to the kind folks on the Highland Park Mailing List, I would need to mount that antenna very high off my little one-and-a-half-story carriage house to possibly receive any signal with it, and I would need to point it at exactly the right angle to receive many stations. A professional installer would charge me hundreds of dollars for such a job.

Dish Network can give me a ton of news channels, music channels, Chinese channels, Japanese channels, Polish channels, Spanish channels, porn channels, and so on, but they can't give me the few channels I care about most: broadcast TV in high definition. The Steelers have three Monday Night games this year on ABC and most of their other games are on CBS. Should the Yankees even make the playoffs this year, most of the games would be on Fox. Comcast carries the local affiliates of CBS, ABC, Fox, PBS, the WB, and most recently NBC in high definition and I don't need anything else on my roof. In fact, Comcast would be more than happy to remove all three satellite dishes from my roof. How nice of them. They'll even come by before football season starts.

The Digital Video Recorder That Doesn't

I paid $250 to lease a Dish 942 receiver with a built-in Digital Video Recorder (DVR). On the surface, the thing is great: it can handle two TVs in different rooms, each with their own remote; it has a sharp DVI output; and it has a 250 GB hard drive that can hold up to 20 hours of high-definition programming. Live television on the channels I receive looks great. Its software feels very fast as it searches through thousands of program listings in seconds. It even has a few USB ports, though I'm not sure what they would be used for. There's just one thing it can't do that my old ReplayTV could do: record programs when I tell it to.

I've felt like a beta tester for an unfinished product. I have had so many problems with my 942 that I now have the phone number to reach Echostar's development team directly. There was the "known issue" in which a program record request would stop recording any more episodes suddenly and without warning. Another unresolved issue: after a seemingly-arbitrary number of events had been queued up for recording, I'd get a message that "the maximum number of event timers has been reached. Try deleting some unused timers and schedule your recording again." Bizarrely, rebooting the DVR would often make that message go away -- and that's especially good because the DVR frequently rebooted itself for no reason. Basically, trying to record a program became a game of chance. I don't enjoy playing phone tag with developers trying to file a bug report on a device I paid good money to use.

Digital Does Not Mean "Good"

During my twenty-minute phone call to cancel my Dish Network service, my "account specialist" pulled out every fear-mongering trick in the book to get me to stay. He said that Dish offers the "lowest all-digital price" of any television provider and that "every channel on Dish Network is digital." That's true, but it doesn't tell the whole story: just because something is "digital" does not make it good.

An analog signal can degrade. You get static or distortion when an analog signal gets weak, but a digital signal consists of ones and zeroes: if data gets lost, it's lost. This results in dropped frames and oddly-colored artifacts on the picture. Even though I supposedly had a signal quality of roughly 90% on WPGH-DT, the local Fox affiliate, high-definition baseball games were studded with pixelation and dialog boxes that "a portion of the recorded event was not captured due to signal loss." A bit of fuzziness is fine by me; anything less than a perfect digital signal yields a terrible viewing experience.

What's even more aggravating is that although Dish Network doesn't carry digital broadcasts like WPGH-DT and WTAE-DT, they needlessly convert analog broadcasts to digital so that they can transmit them to me by satellite. Signals that would normally degrade gracefully become pixelated messes if there are any problems in reception. I'm very glad that I don't have to look forward to a Pittsburgh winter in which I have to brush snow and scrape ice off of two satellite dishes should I want to hole up and watch television for a while.

Beautifying the Neighborhood

The same day that my two dishes were installed, I received a note on my door from my neighbor Frank. Frank, himself a Dish Network subscriber, was upset that one of my dishes was mounted on my exterior wall just four feet above his lawn. Bear in mind that I hadn't met Frank at all before this encounter -- talk about a bad first impression. I called Dish and they sent the installer back to move the offending dish higher up, but the installer was unable to put the dish any higher than about eight feet off the ground. "Your neighbor's starting to piss me off," remarked the installer to me, as he warned me about the irreversible damage I could be doing to my roof with this reinstallation job. It turns out that due to the positions of trees and buildings around my little house, it's not possible to mount Dish Network's dishes very high. The DirecTV dish, by contrast, remains unobtrusive but doesn't point in the same direction as Dish's satellites.

Satellite dishes to me are unsightly and more of a liability than an asset. The mounts, as my installer warned me, might dig into my recently-remodeled roof and damage it, causing leaks. I've been told that some people steal them and sell them on the black market. They're prone to weather damage, whether it be due to a severe storm or a coating of snow. I can sleep easier with nothing more than thin little cables going into my house.

Fear of Commitment

So I ended up signing a one-year commitment back in June. For my infidelity I'll have to pay a penalty of $20 per month for the balance of my agreement, a total of $200. Comcast, meanwhile, locked in a promotional rate for one year without the need for me to provide even a credit card number. I like the fact that Comcast thinks highly enough of its products that it doesn't lock in its customers to restrictive, punitive contracts.

In early 2003 it took three attempts and more than a month to get Comcast to set up cable at my apartment. I never thought I'd find a company I'd less like to deal with for TV, but Dish fit that role perfectly. I wouldn't recommend them to anyone who wants HD programming in a relatively small house.

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