Why no new competitor equipment upgrades?

budda

SatelliteGuys Pro
Original poster
Mar 21, 2006
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Oconomowoc
IMO Dish has the best DVR Hands down. Whether is Direct TV , Charter, TIVO. No carrier has added tuners and features like the Hopper. Is it a cost thing? Or just no need cuz the subs are so low? Just wondering. Thanks
 
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Dying industry. New equipment(R&D) may not be worth it. I mean ATT released the genie 2, but in reality, how long in the works was that first. I think we will have a couple more releases across the industry as it continually dies down more and more and we see the companies merging more and more.
 
the only people i see staying with satellite are people out in the sticks that can't get a good internet conn!!! i have been waiting for the longest to see if dish was gonna release a bigger dish with HD at the time and now there getting into 4k. as people would have to give up 4 HD chanels just to watch one 4k channel. and then try and find a provider that won't charge em more for that!!! good luck on that!!!
 
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IMO Dish has the best DVR Hands down. Whether is Direct TV , Charter, TIVO. No carrier has added tuners and features like the Hopper. Is it a cost thing? Or just no need cuz the subs are so low? Just wondering. Thanks

When Dish and DirecTV first started, we started selling them both. To be honest, we had more failures with Dish Network's hardware than we ever did DirecTV. Dish's referb receivers were horrible. I went to their warehouse in Altoona, PA and picked up 25 referb receivers, and we had 7 failures out of 25 right out of the box. After that, we bought nothing but new.

Since I retired, I've heard people say they've had all kinds of problems with Dish's DVR's. A good friend of mine has had 3 replacements in just over a year. Not sure how DirectTV's are now that we're out of the business. I had 10 of the DVR's that failed in stock when we closed the business, and I stripped the hard drives out of them, reformatted them. Sold some, used the others. :)
 
the only people i see staying with satellite are people out in the sticks that can't get a good internet conn!!! i have been waiting for the longest to see if dish was gonna release a bigger dish with HD at the time and now there getting into 4k. as people would have to give up 4 HD chanels just to watch one 4k channel. and then try and find a provider that won't charge em more for that!!! good luck on that!!!

Everybody is NOT going to streaming only. Soon, hopefully by the end of this year, I’ll be connected to gigabit fiber (and I live out in the sticks). I’ll be able to do multiple streams of 4K and more with that. However I’m not giving up my DirecTV, I’ll just supplement it. I know I’m not the only one. Streaming keeps getting higher and higher. Just look at DirecTV Now numbers last quarter only 49,000 adds.
 
When Dish and DirecTV first started, we started selling them both. To be honest, we had more failures with Dish Network's hardware than we ever did DirecTV. Dish's referb receivers were horrible. I went to their warehouse in Altoona, PA and picked up 25 referb receivers, and we had 7 failures out of 25 right out of the box. After that, we bought nothing but new.

Since I retired, I've heard people say they've had all kinds of problems with Dish's DVR's. A good friend of mine has had 3 replacements in just over a year. Not sure how DirectTV's are now that we're out of the business. I had 10 of the DVR's that failed in stock when we closed the business, and I stripped the hard drives out of them, reformatted them. Sold some, used the others. :)

Going on 10 years with Dish receivers/DVR's in our RV bouncing around the countryside for thousands of miles and we've had exactly one hardware failure. That was an LNB that failed after I dropped it on a concrete patio... Oops!
 
Going on 10 years with Dish receivers/DVR's in our RV bouncing around the countryside for thousands of miles and we've had exactly one hardware failure. That was an LNB that failed after I dropped it on a concrete patio... Oops!

I've heard similar stories, and I'm glad Dish works for you. Having been a dealer selling Dish, I saw a lot more failures than the average Joe. A lot of the failures we saw were hard drive failures and poorly designed software, and the fact that Dish forced their customers to upgrade when their old equipment was working just fine. Elderly folks didn't make the transition very well to a more complicated unit.

However, if I were to go back to a subscription service, Dish would be my choice. I never liked DirecTV even though we sold them. :) BTW, is Dish now using solid state hard drives? That would be a great improvement over the old platter style drives.
 
As far as I know, Dish is still using conventional platter drives in the newest Hopper series DVR's. Our two Hopper 2's have them anyway, and we haven't had any problems with them. I agree solid state drives would be a good reliability enhancement.

I replaced all the drives in our computers and mass storage devices with solid state drives and I couldn't believe the difference. Everything worked a lot faster and the retrieval time on movies were much faster, and unless you dropped them off the roof, you aren't like to trash a drive. I guess they're still too expensive for Dish to use in their receivers. :)
 
As far as I know, Dish is still using conventional platter drives in the newest Hopper series DVR's. Our two Hopper 2's have them anyway, and we haven't had any problems with them. I agree solid state drives would be a good reliability enhancement.
what about the write issues everones talking about with SSD'S though i do agree id'e rather have a SSD in my hopper than a platter drive as an SSD can take more abuse. and the hopper will be faster:)
 
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Navychop is correct on the suitability of SSD drives for video due to the limited number of write cycles BUT it would be nice to have the option to use one in something like the Wally for RV use, RV use MAY not be as constant as in the house the the SSD would definitely be more rugged and able to withstand the more demanding environment.
 
the only people i see staying with satellite are people out in the sticks that can't get a good internet conn!!! i have been waiting for the longest to see if dish was gonna release a bigger dish with HD at the time and now there getting into 4k. as people would have to give up 4 HD chanels just to watch one 4k channel. and then try and find a provider that won't charge em more for that!!! good luck on that!!!
I live in a small town, where our Internet sometimes works for days without going down, but it still goes down. I also have Dish and the Hopper 3. We have had some issues with it going out, but I will stick with Dish being on vs our High Speed Internet going down. We were having issues with our old Modem/Router, and we have a new Modem/Router, and we still continue to have issues with it. I have even considered going with our local cable company, in terms of Internet only, but they are even worse than our current ISP. Cord cutting is not even a topic in our household.
 
Modern spinning disks can withstand shocks in excess of 30Gs while operating and 250Gs while powered off. Moving them around a lot should not significantly decrease their lifespan.

http://products.wdc.com/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-800026.pdf

This specs are correct but we still specify SSDs when we need the best reliability in harsh conditions, by we I mean my military customers.

We recently had a hardware install at a remote location (one flight a week in and out) that Dell was required to provide on-site support for equipment failures, Dell would only agree if we used SSD instead of spinning rust, same initial cost but Dell was adamant that they wouldn't assume the cost risk of on-site engineer support with the spinning rust.
 
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This specs are correct but we still specify SSDs when we need the best reliability in harsh conditions, by we I mean my military customers.

We recently had a hardware install at a remote location (one flight a week in and out) that Dell was required to provide on-site support for equipment failures, Dell would only agree if we used SSD instead of spinning rust, same initial cost but Dell was adamant that they wouldn't assume the cost risk of on-site engineer support with the spinning rust.

Sure. SSDs should be more reliable in general, just not for this application, or at least not at a price a MVPD will be willing to pay.
 

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