Divorcing DISH Network
I’ve lived in my condo by the river for almost 17 years!(*). When I first moved in my neighbors had DISH network so I got it also. It was one of the first things I did. It was middle of the winter, basketball season and I HAD to see Warriors games. DISH advertised a $50 bonus for recommending them to a friend. My downstairs neighbor recommended me to snag the $50 bonus. They never paid him. That shoulda told me something about ole DISH…
(*) Longest I’ve lived anywhere in my whole life. You’ll see when you get older, the years just seem to kind of chunk away without you really noticing …
The DISH installation fellow came out, bolted a DISH dish to the roof, ran some coax cable through the exterior wall and down the inside wall to the DVR box and hooked me up!
I’ve paid their > $100/month fees (now $128) every month for over 16 years, which is more money than I want to think about!
And I would still more or less happily be doing so except that last spring I came back from a family visit to find to my horror that they no longer carried NBC Bay Area, the flagship station of the Warriors and the Giants. Some stupid fee dispute. Typical pissing contest between a greedy tv company and a greedy content provider. Eff them all.
That put me into a frenzy of “I won’t stand for this” internet research. But none of the other options looked very good at the time. The NBA season was almost over, Warriors weren’t gonna make the playoffs, so I just paid my $128/month like always and lived with it for the summer.
I don’t care much about baseball, but the Giants season turned out to be surprisingly epic!
So thanks to stupid DISHI missed a season of Kruk and Kuip calling surprising Giants wins..
That said, baseball just ain’t that big a deal for me. Basketball season however IS that big of a deal. So when the Warriors preseason rolled around in October I got in gear to check my options again. I watched a couple of games at the bar, but that is not a sustainable option for me for the 82 game season.
So … time to figure this shit out!
- DirectTV is not an option. I know from using it at other folks’ houses that the usability and the hardware are vastly inferior to DISH. Replay is terrible, slo-mo is non-existent, browsing the DVR sucks. The whole experience just sucks.
- Only other cable option in Reno is new corporate behemoth called Spectrum. Our local cable oppressor used to be called Charter Cable, but Spectrum has gobbled them up .and become my new local cable oppressor.
- The new option is streaming services. My neighbor has YouTube TV (YTV). Until now I haven’t taken streaming seriously as an option, but the YTV model kind of appeals to me.
- Streaming brings us to my internet situation. I have been living off my downstairs neighbor’s wifi for nine or so years! If I’m gonna get Spectrum Cable, I should probably get their internet. It’s relatively cheap as an add-on, and if I move to streaming, I should have my own internet.
So first swing at the plate was signing up for Spectrum internet and cable TV, with the DVR option. Watching tv without a DVR was unthinkable to me at the time.
The Spectrum installation fellow came out, and we had a busy day. We found the actual coax feed pretty easily, but the quality of the signal was awful. So next stop was determining where the cable box was ifor the building. Turns out it is outside, an a fenced off area where the electrical box also is. My neighbor Bruce grows tomatoes down there, so he has a key!
The Spectrum guy got the internet tuned up as well as he was able, but he had not brought a DVR. He gave me a regular cable box and said I had to go to the Spectrum store for that.
Two days later, I went to the Spectrum store, got my DVR, came home and hooked it up, and … it sucked!
The screen went dead when you went to the channel giude – the program stopped playing. The channel guide took seconds to refresh. It stressed me out just to try to watch a ball game.
Time to take streaming seriously.
If I’m gonna stream, my internet had better be good, and right now it is not! Sitting right here with my new cable wifi modem on the same table, the “speedtest” is slower than for the downstairs DSL wifi I was getting from my neighbor, travelling through the concrete floor.
So I chatted up Spectrum again (chatting is by far the best way to talk to those folks), and they scheduled me for another visit, this time from a signal quality specialist.
This fella was a whole new experience. The other guy was friendly, smiled a lot, but turned out to be more into blowing smoke up your ass than doing any extra work. Today’s guy however was brusque to the edge of rudeness, but he fixed me up! His trusty testing device insisted that my signal was being split somewhere. I didn’t have a clue. As I said above, I got DISH two weeks after I moved in, and haven’t given a thought to the cable in my wall for 16 years.
He climbed my ladder to look at the roof (first guy said he wasn’t allowed to do that). We got the key from Bruce again to check outside. He sniffed around my closets like a hungry badger, tossing boxes around, but eventually he DID find a splitter in the master bedroom closet (!) Why? Who knows…
Trying to learn to love streaming
In Reno, I rarely visit Target. In Petaluma I go all the time it seems. Anyway, on this visit I got a cute little Roku box.
Back at home I signed up for a Fubo free trial. It was ok, but not awesome.
The search continues… a couple of days later I also signed up for a Youtube TV (YTV) free trial.
I liked it better. More channels, and the way it saved shows made more sense to me.
So I (thought I) ended the free trial with Fubo and went with YTV.
This turned out to be temporary, but at the time I signed up, YTV and Roku were in some kind of pissing contest about royalties or somesuch, so that Roku in a snit removed the YTV app. To get to YTV on Roku you had to:
- select Youtube app
- left arrow
- 8 down arrows
- Select
- Select
Gosh what a pain in the ass!
My iPhone 7 just doesn’t cut it anymore
Got a new phone from Spectrum, iPhone 13!
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