That's me. Stay at home watch my Hopper & keep up with my cell phone. I fit right in during the Covid scare.
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I enjoy going places too. Just not to neighborhoods where there's an armed guard at the front door of Burger King, where the Pepsi and Budweiser delivery guys have armed guards riding with them, where I had an attempted car jacking, where I was asked ' do you want to buy some DVDs' from a guy selling pirated DVDs out of his trunk, then saying "no thanks' only be yelled at 'hey white boy get back here now and buy some DVDs', to having a fight break out in front of me inside a check cashing place while I was doing by job, to missing a stabbing by 5 minutes, to having a customer of mine being robbed at gun point at while I was supposed to be there, but fate intervened. Plus more. And that's only my experiences in Buffalo, there's also my time in Rochester.
This was my early to mid 20s, experiencing life outside of rural living for the first time. And I don't like it.
Call me crazy, but I'd rather not go to places with bars on windows and armed guards at fast food restaurants. If I wanted to subject myself to that environment I'll just go down the road to Attica.
Self-owned servicers based locally to the customer (local dealers) pretty much naturally act to avoid vague/missed call times, as opposed to centralized scheduling by a fleet operator. All I can say is that I never at any point had customers waiting for open-ended hours on a call and if a call had been scheduled but I wasn't going to make it or make it at a given time (which was never left open for hours), I was in immediate contact. This, I guess, DiSH just didn't want.
DiSH didn't sell self-installation kits (that I know of). It provided them without charge to buyers of systems who had either been sold them by nonservicing "retailers" or by DiSH themselves. They notably ran a promotion wherein they had Santa Claus sending "free self-installation kits" as a gift from DiSH.
Ho-Ho-Ho....Put up the lights, put up the dish.
What they didn't do was to refer local dealers! Not that they'd necessarily even know which ones to refer as they'd lumped us all, longtime dealers and the hucksters alike that they'd recruited to sell only, into the same "retailer" definition. Once when I asked about this, they told me that their CSRs "deserved to make some money, too," presumably from direct-selling commissions. They didn't say as to what the customer deserved.
They didn't deserve treatment like that, in 1998 or any other year A.D. It shows the underlying character (or lack) of DiSH. Granted DTV worked very similarly in that regard, but DiSH had promised us all much better. Hypocrisy makes it all the worse.
People may become more insecure in a lot of ways as they age and become less physically and/or mentally adept/confident. Crime fears are most strongly tied to crime fearmongering (which there is always plenty of because it works), with age having fairly little to do with susceptibility.
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Why don't we just create a "I hate Dish Network" thread so we can congregate all these DISH bashing posts in one place and not let them contaminate every single DISH thread?
There's an entire site for that called dishretailer.com, but you pretty much have to be a DiSH dealer, er, "retailer" to participate in the daily bashing. The dealers on that board were part of putting a class-action lawsuit on them for defrauding us that they were made to pay out on. And not pennies. $1000s to 100s of $1000 per dealer.
Suffice it to say, there's the DiSH in front of the curtain, and the other DiSH behind it.
Back in 1997 I bought a DISH 3000 (IR remote) and a 4000 (UHF remote). For and extra $49 I bought the installation kit. It included a dish, mounting hardware, roof anchors, 50' or 75' of coax, SW-21 (??) switch, a grounding clamp, and a compass. This was purchased at FRY's in San Jose, CA., and was before any locals available. When locals were available, a second dish pointed to 148deg. So here I am after 29 years still a DISH customer with a Hopper 3, 2 Joeys, and a Wally for camping.
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And all the time self installed?
Hm, that must have been the rare big-box store that DiSH was in back then. Charlie desperately wanted to be in all of them but DTV had locked up exclusives.
Hm, that must have been the rare big-box store that DiSH was in back then. Charlie desperately wanted to be in all of them but DTV had locked up exclusives.
Back in the day Dish was in Sears, Costco, and a few other big box retailers. I do remember specifically DIRECTV had Radio Shack, Circuit City and Best Buy in the early days.
The big box stores business model worked when systems cost $200 or more for a 1 room system and the consumer only needed to point a Dish towards 101 for DIRECTV and 119 for DISH. At the time the installations where easy enough for most people who where handy with a set of tools.
Where the box stores became less popular was when both providers went to a free install, and the customer was no longer allowed to take the equipment home with them.
Where the Big box stores essentially got out of the satellite business so to speak was when everything went to a free multi room installation. Since there was so many options such as the number of rooms, High Definition, and DVR you had to have someone knowledgeable that could sell the service and enter an order in the system. Going to Best Buy and Radio Shack, signing up for satellite, was basically being referred to an 800 number and a promotion code on a piece of paper so Best Buy or Radio shack could get credit for the sale.
Radio Shack eventually sold Dish for a short period of time. It was not by choice, but rather piracy. Too many people where going to Radio Shack and buying systems for the access card to pirate the systems, and never activating them. Radio shack was losing money due to the non activation of the equipment they had sold and went to Dish because at the time Dish did not have a piracy problem. Dish eventually had a worse piracy problem than DIRECTV, but it did not make a difference for any of the box stores since nobody was taking equipment home with them after signing up for an installation
It didn't come with an SW21 148 Didn't become operational till some time in late 1998 and Dish didn't get 110 till 1999 when it was acquired from Rupert Murdoch
I would not say that DiSH at any time "had a worse piracy problem" than DTV, which was for certain period in the 90s basically wide open to hacking through smart card attacks. Charlie would regularly denounce DTV CEOs for allowing it to continue, which he considered to be a robber of business from DiSH. Attacks on DiSH would come but were never as easy or widespread as those of DTV.
Satellite TV piracy usually requires a satellite receiver and an access card which needs to be modified.
Back 20 years ago you needed to find the right hardware, which was either from eBay, Radio Shack or a dealer. Equipment where at times hard to come by, and for the right equipment, even un-modified it was selling for hundreds of dollars.
Then came Free To Air, by the hundreds of thousands they where imported from over seas. All you had to do was go online, download something on a thumb drive and you had free DISH and Expressvu TV. The FTA boxes where cheap, selling for around $100.
Now later when Dish sued some of the FTA manufactures such as Pansat, and Viewsat it later came out they had people who would write the software and distribute it online in an order to sell more FTA boxes.
So although DIRECTV did indeed have a piracy problem in the early 2000's the issue was far worse when the piracy issue shifted to DISH and the only DISH hardware you needed was the actual DISH network Dish and LNB.
DISH isn't even worth stealing today as piracy was popular due to international programming and sports content which DISH no longer carries. DIRECTV would be more desirable due to the sports programming including Sunday Ticket.
However piracy for both providers has gone away completely due to the internet and jail broken fire sticks being sold everywhere
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Directv has not had sunday ticket for a few years
- Nov 29, 2003
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Still has it for Commercial Establishments (Casinos, Bars, Restaurants, etc).
This isn't exactly the way I recall it, but I'm open to correction. A lot was going on. To my recollect, the hack you "just needed the stock hardware (rx & smart card) for" was for DTV, in its 90s-era piracy, and for DiSH (a little later, particularly after some shutdown of DTV piracy) you needed something called an emulator and even a computer (along with stock rx) to pirate it. Early-period DTV smart cards, which were particularly hackable, brought big $$ on eBay, particularly the ones referred to as F-cards, which had an image of a football player on them. Also called "football cards". All you had to do was to get the card "fixed' and then put it back into the rx. eBay did move to ban standalone card sales, but you could just sell DTV rx's along with their native card, and buyers then would either use both or just discard the rx and fix the card for use in their existing system. I got several (unhacked) DTV boxes in trade for switching to DiSH (people wanted my service level and I didn't do DTV), which I sold through eBay, largely to Canadian buyers. I would just throw one up there on a "buy now" for $100s and it'd be snapped up in minutes.
As to FTA hardware being a significant source of DiSH piracy, I don't remember that. While I have no cause to doubt it, this would seem to me to have been much more of a "geek interest" deal than the broadly mainstream pirating viewership of DTV on its native (and simple to use) hardware.
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My point was with traditional piracy you still had to have a DIRECTV or DISH satellite receiver and associated smart card. You may have needed some additional 3rd party hardware along the way to make it happen, but they key is you had to have actual equipment from the company.
With both providers going to the lease model, customers who cancelled their service had to send their equipment back. Then not to mention eBay disallowing sales of access cards, and DISH later getting involved essentially reporting any auction that shows a picture of a smart card to eBay for copyright infringement. It was very hard to get equipment in large quantities
People had to get their hands on the satellite equipment, with the right card and then they usually took it to someone to program it. Or they went to someone who programmed equipment and bought everything from them
With the FTA equipment, the sky was the limit. You went online placed an order on one of the dozens of websites and had it delivered in 2-5 days. Went online, downloaded a file for your thumb drive and you where good to go. Just like a jail broken fire stick, most people could do it themselves.
If you where a dealer, and If you wanted 1000 FTA receivers, you call Pansat, Viewsat or Coolsat and with enough money, you order 1000 units. They arrive a week later. You sell those 1000 receivers, you call again and order 1000 more. Dealers couldn't keep FTA on their shelves, they where selling as fast as illegal drugs. Legal only if they didn't ship programmed
As a dealer If you want 1000 DISH receivers, you could order those 1000 receivers from a DISH authorized distributor. However you don't know if those receivers have the right cards, and after you order a few thousand boxes and DISH doesn't see your activating them like you should, they are going to start asking questions.
Nobody at the FTA distributor asks questions when you place a large order.
To go one step further, someone was even to take a blank white smart card and turn that into a pirated DISH card. At this point all you needed was any receiver you could get off eBay.
It came down to equipment availability, then pretty much exploded in the late 2000's when FTA was being sold all over the place and DISH was the more desirable service to pirate. The only advantage DIRECTV had over DISH was at the time Sunday Ticket. Dish became popular due to the international programming, better hardware if you used a DISH receiver, and not to mention with the FTA hardware, you could pirate both DISH and Expressvu on the same box. Besides the handful of Canadian channels such as the Space channel, you had about 20 porn channels between the 2 services. Also with DISH Sunday ticket was not necessary as you could still get a decent number of local channels depending on your spot beam which would show a good number of games anyways. I think expressvu may have had the rights to Sunday ticket back then in Canada
And yes DIRECTV does have the Sunday Ticket for commercial accounts. Its being broadcasted on the satellite but you only see if if you have a commercial receiver
But again to my point, it actually was never at all "hard" to obtain hackable satellite hardware, particularly of the DTV variety. Box stores were loaded with the stuff. It only required money, but a few 100 was nothing to someone salivating over getting all of those channels unlocked. Dealers were getting pallets of the stuff and some were separating cards from rx's and hacking themselves or sending them out. They had customers willing to pay ~$1,000.00. Hacking was at one time so synonymous with DTV that it was common water cooler fare.
Again for DiSH I seem to remember there was some kind of a circuit board adapter that would be inserted into the card slot to use a card "emulator," rather than simple hack and reinsertion of stock card. Not simple, not unobtrusive, and not widely deployed. DiSH fought its own piracy though a series of card swaps, but I don't think it was because the cards themselves were being hacked and reinserted like with DTV. DiSH had an advantage in its security being inherently harder to crack. I believe that really the only reason it was at all was from a Nagra insider selling secrets.
FTA was "sold all over the place" but was still never mainstream in any way close to volumes of DTV & DiSH.
Again for DiSH I seem to remember there was some kind of a circuit board adapter that would be inserted into the card slot to use a card "emulator," rather than simple hack and reinsertion of stock card. Not simple, not unobtrusive, and not widely deployed. DiSH fought its own piracy though a series of card swaps, but I don't think it was because the cards themselves were being hacked and reinserted like with DTV. DiSH had an advantage in its security being inherently harder to crack. I believe that really the only reason it was at all was from a Nagra insider selling secrets.
FTA was "sold all over the place" but was still never mainstream in any way close to volumes of DTV & DiSH.
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