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I have had Dish and also have digital cable. I was paying for the pay as you go Dish with our RV and using Dish also (hopper / joey) at our relatives cabin for a while. We figured it would be cheaper to ditch digital cable and go with a satellite service we can use both home and on the road. DirecTV priced out cheaper for the channels we wanted and it is better suited to our dome satellite on the RV anyways.

Boy, I feel like I made the worst decision I've made in a long time and I should have found a place where you could demo the Genie because if I had I would have never went with DTV. My only hope is maybe there are some tricks to using it I haven't found and the hardware is not totally unintuitive and archaic as it seems even compared to our 10 year old digital cable hardware, let alone the Hopper. Please don't make the mistake I did, go out and try the Genie before you get into a contract to see if you can even live with it.

Here's the problems... and it started right away when the on demand and "TV Shows" icon (not sure what the latter does) did not work. It says wait an hour for it to update, but it has been about 8 hours. DTV says to wait 24 hours and call back. Maybe it will eventually start working, but that is just minor gripe to compared to the hardware (mainly Guide and DVR). The box is confirmed to be connected with the internet and talking to DTV so who knows. But here are the things that are just terrible design and functionality to the point you can't believe this is their latest and greatest stuff.

1) On Dish and my old as dirt digital cable, if you hover onto a slot on the channel guide it will tell you in the corner if it is a new episode or not with a little "new" icon or the word "new". Not so with DTV/Genie... you have no clue if a episode is new or not unless you click Info, then look at the air date, then look at the current date to see if they match, and you still don't know if it was first run, just if the first run was on that date. DTV acts like this is a challenge to do on their forums, yet every other provider has no problem identifying first runs as opposed to leaving it to the user to make an assumption based on air date. On my DC, and I think also on the Hopper, I could filter shows by new episodes only so I could see a list of all new shows that day and forward to look for new stuff I didn't know about.

2) On Dish and DC when you are browsing the guide and see a show you want to record new episodes of you can just click record new episodes and it will record only new episodes. On Genie if you have your default settings set to "First Run Only" and hit record (2x) on a rerun you see on your guide at 7pm today, but the next first run is 2 days later at 9pm, you would expect it to only record the 9pm one. Instead, it wants to record the rerun also that you used to setup the recording with. Not a huge deal except if you have other stuff recording it will say "Conflict" and want you to cancel something else because it insists on recording this rerun you don't want. So now to record it you have to hunt for a later episode or even the next first run episode to setup the recording, total PITA. Never had this problem with DC or Dish.

3) Oh, speaking on conflicts... on the Hopper, unless I have been imagining this feature, if there is a conflict it lets you know, in case you want to re-prioritize which records first... but the ones that can't be recorded it will find the next airing of that episode (which is usually 2 hours later for cable shows) and automatically record it. So conflicts are of little consequence with a Hopper, you'll get all the shows eventually. At least that is how it appears to work because the cabin has a 1H/2J setup and can only watch/record 3 non-network shows at time and it never fails to record something that was conflicted, it just records the next rerun. But with Genie it is either you get it at the first run time, or you have to go find the next time yourself and manually record it - essentially shuffling around your conflicts. When you couple this fact with #2 above where it wants to record the rerun you used to setup your "First Run Only" recording you can quickly run into conflicts that require a lot of jockeying to get the recordings set. At least that is how it appears to work and I seriously hope I'm wrong.

4) The DVR listing is terrible. For instance on DC I would just click the DVR button and it pulls up recorded shows and could toggle with a click between the recorded shows and upcoming (scheduled) shows. Very easy and straightforward, and similarly obvious with the Hopper. Not so with Genie... you can see your recorded shows by clicking "List" which is easy enough, but to see whats upcoming you have to click Menu, then click down twice, then click select, then click over once, then select, then select... 7 clicks just to see what is coming up!!! Why in the word would you not just your recorded and upcoming shows toggled between, or at least have a button on the remote to take you directly to scheduled shows?!

So tell me, does the Genie really suck as bad it feels right now, or am I overlooking some way to accomplish these things with greater ease and it is powerful once you learn some shortcuts that are not publicized? If not I seriously hope DTV has a 48 hour cancellation window or something because this is the worst experience I have had with any receiver in the first 24 hours without a doubt. As a software developer by trade I can usually pick on new systems in general without needing a ton of time with it to know if I like it or not, and I know it takes a little hands on to get used to a new platform before it feels second nature... but outside our own receivers I've never had a problem using other peoples new and old DC receivers or Dish, and definitely never said to myself "I would never buy this service if this is what I'd get"... not until DTV.

Aside from watching TV (Play/Pause/FF/RR etc) 95% of my interaction with the receiver is:
- Searching and browsing the guide for shows (typically looking for new airings of shows that night I don't have set to record that I might like, because since I don't watch commercials I usually only find out about a show by browsing the entire guide using a filter of "list all first run airings only").
- Scheduling/managing upcoming recordings
And probably 3% is probably pulling up the recorded list and hitting play (which thankfully the Genie can do this without a lot of fuss), and the other 2% just misc stuff.

What kills this thing for me is the 95% of how I interact with the receiver the Genie either can't do it or is totally nonintuitive. If it were just something like incidental like "the way the favorites list works is not ideal" (which seems to work ok, just using as an example)... I wouldn't care about that. It is just the core usage, at least for me, it feels like I am using a receiver that was released before my 10 year old DC receiver and I'm taking a step backwards instead of forwards. Seriously, I would swap my old Motorola/SA receiver out for the Genie if it could work with DTV and had 5 tuner capability.

I didn't even have huge expectations, I just thought it would at least as good in terms of usability as my 10 year old DC receiver and assumed it would be similarly intuitive as the Hopper in the general usage. But on the flip side I wasn't going to be surprised if it was next-level stuff and just totally awesome since DTV is such a large player in the space.

Bottom line, I am just so disappointed... enough to sign up and try to get some help on these issues if they can be resolved and if not leave this information behind for others before they sign on the dotted line. It pains me to think about being anchored to this thing for 2 years when there are such better alternatives in receivers these days between DC and Dish.

I'm hoping someone can show me light and I am just overlooking some things and it is not as bad as it seems. That or just tell me I'll learn to live with frustration of the shortcomings of this receiver as time goes on... or that a firmware update is coming soon that will improve it. =P