For some, maybe. Certainly not the case here. Cable offerings/quality/equipment/costs vary widely from city to city, even within the large cable conglomerates. Here, we have no FIOS, so it's only Dish, Direct, or the local podunk cable company, who isn't part of one of the conglomerates. My parents still have their cable in their apartment. (No LOS for a dish) They pay more for fewer channels, PQ is nothing special, and hardware? Their receiver still has the same interface their boxes have used since 1999. Dish is a long way from being perfect, but they are way ahead of the local competition here.
Right now, I have no other options except for Dish or DirecTV.
But where I live is located in Phase II of our rural electric cooperative’s fiber build out project.
They have started construction on Phase II and hopefully it will be complete by the end of the year.
I’ll be going from being able to only get 4.0/512k DSL from CenturyLink to 1Gbps/1Gbps fiber.
The co-op doesn’t have a video option right now, in order to be able to reduce costs for the project.
Only 100Mbps/100Mbps or 1Gbps/1Gbps Internet and VoIP phone service so far.
Hopefully when they get built out in more areas they’ll add a video service.
In the meanwhile after I get the fiber, I had thought about trying one of the streaming services.
Dish’s recent firmware debacle will definitely push me in that direction, if things haven’t gotten a lot better by the time I can get fiber here.
I have never had a new version that basically made my system unusable, but this one has nearly done that when it comes to being able to use multiple Hopper 3’s.