We've had Dish Network for a while now - more channels than we can ever watch, for more money than I like to spend every month. But my husband likes it, so we keep it. Some of our friends have canceled cable or satellite television and watch what they can get with the antenna or online and subscribe to Netflix for $9/month for movies, video, and TV on demand. Since most of the time I turn the local channels on, which I can get over the antenna, or end up watching shows on hulu because I just can't watch them when they're actually on, I think I'd be perfectly happy doing the same thing. I just have to convince the man, and he has to figure out how we want to hook the televisions up to the Internet. I keep telling him how much money we'll save every month.
Yesterday we started having problems with one of our DISH receivers. It's supposed to run two TVs at once, so you can watch different shows in different rooms if you want to. I had GMA on in the living room and went to the bedroom to sort laundry. I thought I'd turn it on down there, but nothing happened. It just kept saying it was searching for signal. After the 4N6 Family Night last night, I had Jeffrey test it to see if he could figure it out. We found out that it didn't matter which TV it was, the LCD HDTV in the living room or the other one in the bedroom, the receiver would only run one of them at a time. So, he called customer service and they ran him through a bunch of stuff - testing connections and running tests - all to no avail.
So, they said they'd send a technician out to check it and bring a new receiver if we needed one - for $15. I really resent having to pay anything, considering it's their equipment. If something goes wrong with equipment that is owned by DISH Network, shouldn't they pay the technician to come out and fix it? Never mind that they make us pay some fee every month for insurance or something - again, on their equipment. And they just recently raised our rates, while saying that they weren't raising rates. Well, OK, they didn't technically raise the rates - they changed the fees for the receivers, but the end result is that we're paying more per month, which is the same thing in my book. So, when they offered to send a technician and charge us more money I thought it would be a good time to just say forget it and seriously seriously think about canceling their service altogether.
The technician came today and replaced the receiver. We can watch TV on both televisions at once again. And it will only cost us an extra 15 bucks.
