just started my 24th year with Dish/ Echostar.... and I just received my 2 year guarantee and PCO in December.. saving me a bit over $25 a month...
Ummm...how?Do you mean all these posters got on the phone and called Dish solely for the purpose of establishing how long they had been a customer?I was hoping someone would point out exactly where on Dish's site such information resides as I couldn't find it.Dish will tell you how long you have been a subscriber...
NASA has never been in HD on DISH.This is my 26th year and have had as many as 3 accounts at once but usually have 2. My lake house is in the boonies and it was the first place I had dish. When HD became available in 2000 I installed it at my primary residence. A dual dish setup with one pointing at 61.5 for HD. NASA was the only HD channel available. I still have no streaming alternatives at my lake house as internet is barely available. I have all the streamers you can buy for my primary residence and watch Dish less and less but I still like the DVR so I'm probably going to keep it until a reasonable alternative replaces it.
NASA has never been in HD on DISH.
The first two channels that were carried in HD were HBO and SHOWTIME.
back on topic 22 years here.
Got DISH when a friend told me about it and that they carried NASA TV.
I don't remember that demo channel. I do remember the fish tank demo, though. I don't remember if it was HD, though.What I initially received was the demo channel but it had mostly space walks which is why I mistakingly thought it was NASA.
7,973 days and a few $...25 years, I'm afraid to add it up!As of today, I believe I have been a continuous Dish customer for 7,973 days. Might be off by a couple of days. That is based on the move-in date for the house we were in then and I am not sure if we activated on day 1, 2, or 3. That would have been April 1999.
Sounds very familiar.Echostar 2000 receiver package deal with one year of the Americas Top 120 programming from June of 1996 for me. I remember putting the Dish 300 together and finding a spot in the back yard where I could get a signal through the maple trees on the SW corner of our lot. Of course, the trees are taller now. Good thing we converted to EA a decade ago.
I remember doing an A/B switch between our Valley Cablevision and the Echostar receiver and being amazed how much clearer the image was. I've been with Dish ever since…
Yes I did call them. I wanted to check my memory's health. I was thinking could it be 25 years and sure enough hit 25th aniversary 4 months ago...Ummm...how?Do you mean all these posters got on the phone and called Dish solely for the purpose of establishing how long they had been a customer?I was hoping someone would point out exactly where on Dish's site such information resides as I couldn't find it.
Back in analog days, color was God--awful on my cable TV (Media General now Cox) and OTA as well, because it changed from channel to channel and often from program to program. Green faces: not good! I bought a Sylvania which had a great innovation: automatic color correction that took anything that looked like a flesh tone and made it flesh tone. Stereo, too.I remember doing an A/B switch between our Valley Cablevision and the Echostar receiver and being amazed how much clearer the image was.
October 2020? Were they in business in October 1995? I believe it was around March 1996 when the service started?Yes I did call them. I wanted to check my memory's health. I was thinking could it be 25 years and sure enough hit 25th aniversary 4 months ago...
We bought our ECHOSTAR/DISH kit around Thanksgiving 1995 as a Christmas gift to ourselves. It sure seems as though we had programming before March 1996?October 2020? Were they in business in October 1995? I believe it was around March 1996 when the service started?
NTSC...Never Twice the Same ColorBack in analog days, color was God--awful on my cable TV (Media General now Cox) and OTA as well, because it changed from channel to channel and often from program to program. Green faces: not good! I bought a Sylvania which had a great innovation: automatic color correction that took anything that looked like a flesh tone and made it flesh tone. Stereo, too.
IIRC, Dish has always been digital, and the colors were rock solid. No snow either.
Be Careful!I was a non-stop Dish customer since 1996. I was pissed at our cable company because our local Fox affiliate made a huge deal about having surround sound, so I went out and got a surround sound receiver so I could watch X-files in surround sound only to find out that the cable company was not passing through the surround sound! So I got Dish and never looked back through 5 houses and 2 states.
Absolutely loved Dish Network and refused to go with the competition. Dish receivers and technology were always so much better. I got the original WebTV PVR (wasn't called a DVR then) when it first came out (I had no idea how much it would revolutionize how we watched TV!).
At one point the cable company gave me a full year's worth of cable and a DVR for free. I kept my Dish at the same time and after one sample of the cable company's DVR I hardly ever switched the thing back on. It was far worse than the first Dish DVRs I had 10 years earlier!
I watched Charlie Chat and the Tech Chat religiously. I even won a coffee mug on the Tech Chat (sadly I dropped it and it broke, but by that time the log was worn off anyway).
I loved how Charlie would never give in to content providers' endless demands for more money. For years my Dish bill was very affordable and gave me some real options to choose the channels that I wanted.
But to be honest, eventually the costs kept going up. Monthly locals fee; monthly DVR fee (that one really irked me) and software updates that started to make my beloved DVR not quite as nice: removal of the 4X fast forward mode (useful for watching certain events in the Olympics) and just increasing sluggishness--I think they were trying to pack too much stuff into old hardware. Sluggishness (or lack thereof) was one of the hallmarks of Dish DVRs, and now their DVRs were starting to act as slow as the competition. I tried several times to get a Hopper 3 in the hopes that it had newer hardware that was more responsive, but even after 23 years of continuous service they couldn't see fit to upgrade me.
I might have left Dish sooner had I not been pretty much tied to their system because of all my old DVR recordings, but eventually the cost just became too much. I put my Dish on a 9 month pause (the longest they would allow) so I could finally get through most of my DVR backlog and when I came off pause I canceled about a year ago after about 24 years of service.
Granted, there is no great alternative to Dish. I use YouTubeTV now, but their prices have almost doubled since I first signed up, which is infuriating, and they have lost a few channels that we watch. Obviously the cloud DVR has advantages and disadvantages. It generally works, but certainly not as good as a local DVR and definitely not as good as the Dish DVR. And now the trend appears to be every media outlet has their own streaming service that we'll have to subscribe to anyway.
I'm afraid the golden age of aggregated media content is behind us. It was good while it lasted.