What I miss most about Dish Network

I have been a DIRECTV customer for a year and a half. In general, I’m happy, but everyone, from time to time, I remember what I miss about my old Dish Network account.

First up was the DVR. I think all DVR systems continue to get better over time, but the thing I miss most about my Dish DVR is the ability to skip 30 seconds. This allowed me to hit the skip button about 4 times and skip through all the commercials. With my current DVR, I have no choice but to fast forward through them. Even at the fastest speed, it’s not as fast as pressing the “skip forward” button 4 times. Also, at the fastest speed, I have to pay close attention to the scenes or I can easily pass the point I wanted to start watching again.

The second thing I miss the most is the display guide. Obviously DIRECTV has a viewing guide, but I prefer Dish Networks. I still have the 25″ TV we bought at Costco with our wedding money almost 7 years ago. Dish Network has a large, easy-to-read guide. DIRECTV is much fancier, especially on our TiVo system. Because of this is much slower and harder to read on our archaic television.

My third problem always has to do with the display guide. On Dish Network, we could easily see in the guide which channels we didn’t subscribe to. They appeared in red. I don’t know why DIRECTV doesn’t have this feature. You can select the option to only see channels you are subscribed to, but from my experience this doesn’t work very well and you still see too many channels you don’t want to see. If you don’t have the channel, you don’t really have a way to tell just from the guide view.

And while I’m still on the subject of the guide, let me raise another complaint. With our Dish Network system, my wife and I could have our own personalized lists of the channels we love to watch the most. It was easy to set up and easy to see which list you were on, and very easy to switch between those lists. It seems DIRECTV just has a custom list that we use to filter out all the pay-per-view channels and other channels we don’t get or never watch (like all those shopping channels). Also, switching between viewing all, viewing subscribed, or viewing your custom list is an important test of going into the settings menu and drilling down to the right option. With Dish Network’s system, simply press the guide button again to switch between these lists.

So with everything in life, we can’t have it all. But these four points, along with the fact that Dish Network can be purchased at a cheaper price, make it an attractive option for much of the TV-watching population.