Sale of Direct TV to Dish TV

AT&T has not been good for DirectV. I just had a problem where the screen went dark in the middle of watching. Went through all of the troubleshooting steps in the guide - twice and no luck. Last step is call the help line. Helpline tech runs me through a bunch of steps and does a remote diagnostic still no luck, so they schedule the tech to come out. When he shows up he opens up the little door to where the card is and pushes a red button that's inside that door. Back in business! I asked him why they didn't tell me to try that on the phone or better yet add it to the troubleshooting instructions? He just shrugged and said that since the merger they have ATT techs servicing DirectV problems and they really don't know what they are doing.

Hopefully you're LEAD tech is from the DirectV side of the house.

cavie wrote:
Just got off the phone with Direct TV Service Tech in Ft Myers Fl. There will be no sale of DTV to Dish TV. For now we are stuck with ATT. DTV is for sale but don't expect that to happen anytime soon. 4th Tech coming to my house tomorrow to try to fix my problem. Supposedly LEAD Tech.

Unless AT&T is operating Directv so short staffed that members of the AT&T board of directors are moonlighting as service technicians all you have is gossip.

Now that AT&T has made it clear they want to move as many DTV subscribers as possible off satellite and on to their AT&T TV and HBO Max streaming services, Dish can just sit back watch the subscribers come over on their own.

AT&T Wants to Move DIRECTV Customers to Streaming Services

If not for the fact that Dish is RV friendly and carries the Pac12 network I'd still be on DTV. So glad I switched several years ago. Dish's CS is heads above DTV. Dish is not without faults but they're easier to overcome because of their CS. At least for me anyway.

DTV was great before ATT took over 3 years ago.

I was reading some investor news a month or two back discussing how badly AT&T screwed up when they bought DirecTV. IIRC, they’ve lost something like 5 million subscriptions between it and U-verse since they bought it for $49 billion.

Opinion was it was the worst possible investment at the worst possible time. Conclusion was that consolidation of the satellite business with Dish is virtually inevitable. If regulatory hurdles can’t be overcome, both may flame out since the subscriber pool is dwindling for both.

I've already switched to Dish, sort of. I dropped DirecTV and went with their Sling streaming service.

When I subscribed to Netflix about 3 years ago, I bought a Roku3 streaming device. I dropped my Starz/Encore package with DirecTV. They were the only premium channels that I had and my bill was still about $125 a month.

I owned all of my DirecTV equipment, but they were going to make my boxes obsolete again by not updating them with software downloads.

About 4 months ago, I looked into Sling streaming service which is owned by Dish and I signed up for Sling. With the Sling Blue package and a few ala carte add ons including Starz/Encore, I cut my bill to just under half. With the package I picked, I have all the channels that I watched on DirecTV plus a few that I didn't get with DirecTV.

If you want sports channel's such as ESPN etc you'll need to get the orange package. The blue package has everything orange does except the sports channels. My package consists of the following channels:

Sling Blue $24.99
4 for $10 Deal (4-$5 pkgs) $10.00
Hollywood Extra $5.00
Heartland Extra $5.00
1 Stream $0.00
NBC RSN-CSNMA $0.00
Cloud DVR (50hrs of down load storage) $5.00
Starz $9.00
Taxes $0.00
Total $58.99

Streaming doesn't work very well without good internet. DSL is sometimes OK if it doesn't rain. Cable only goes to the city or in town and no company has cell service everywhere. Many of us have no cell service at all. I'm lucky that I have it in one room.

Just finished a horrible three weeks with dish. They finally replaced a new defective Wally with a used one.

Can’t wait for Elon to get his world wide sat network up. He has some up now and has applied for permits for 30,000 small low altitude sats. I figure he can get about 4 Billion customers. At an average $10 / mo that’s an income of 40 Billion/mo, not bad, I’ll be happy to pay it and say goodbye to Dish.

K Charles wrote:
Streaming doesn't work very well without good internet. DSL is sometimes OK if it doesn't rain. Cable only goes to the city or in town and no company has cell service everywhere. Many of us have no cell service at all. I'm lucky that I have it in one room.

How would rain affect DSL?