Is anyone else as irritated with them as I am?

This is easily the worst company I have dealt with this decade!

Shoddy and deceptive billing practices. Salespeople are liars. Support is non existent.

They just put a dish on my daughter's house and they ran the wires OVER the roof!! And now they want her to pay to move them. Why did they run the wires over the roof when they could have run them 6 more feet around the eves? I'll tell you why, because they make their installers pay for all their own wire and materials and therefore they cut every corner.

This company needs a class action lawsuit up their Direct wazzoo!!!

My experience has been just the opposite. The only recurring problem I've had is with the Barth's sat receiver losing its memory. Never taken more than 5 minutes to restore.

My home installation was very smooth, but I have a friend who is a Dish and DirecTV dealer.

I had Dish for a couple of years, and it was absolutely wretched.

We dumped pay TV (Dish Network at the time) 4-5 years ago and haven't looked back. I was tired of paying monthly to watch mostly commercials.

Now we get HD signals over the air for major networks, and watch everything else for free online (laptop hooked up through flatscreen) on hulu.com and many of the networks that have their shows online. Local library has fairly new DVD releases for $1 (free after movie is 6 months old) so we pay very little for on-screen entertainment these days!

I can tell you the Dish installers are no better. My nephew has Dish installed at a townhouse he was renting. The dish mounted on the wall just outside of where the TV was at. They mounted the dish and ran the cable across the entire wall and round a corner blasting holes every 18" for cable clips. All they had to do was drop the cable straight down and through the wall to the TV. The landlord was a bit ticked off when he saw it.

One product I will give a great review for is Roku. I can't say it will work well in a motorhome but for home use this thing is GREAT. You can get Netflix on it and a bunch of other cool content, much of it is free. I replaced my HTPC with the Roku box and couldn't be happier. It does HD very well and can throttle back the connection when needed. My Comcast connection is very good so I'm always at HD speeds.

I also give the Roku a thumbs up I have had it for a month with Netflix... got rid of Starz and HBO.

We dumped Direct TV a year ago when they stopped providing the XM/Sirius music channels. They refused, saying I had a contract. I told them there was no longer a contract, because they had defaulted on the terms of the contract, hence had unilaterally abrogated the contract, by no longer providing the channels I signed up for and had being paying them for.

They said no dice.

I sent them a copy of my contract, with the music channels on it. They said the new music they were providing was essentially the same. I said no dice.

I disputed their charges on my credit card, and finally closed the card to keep them from constantly charging the card.

It took forever for them to realize I was not going to pay them another nickel, but they did finally mail me a Fedex mailer to return the box.

We now use Dish and are happy.

Installers are local hires, and can be all over the map for either company.

I too have had Roku for better than a year and consider it a great value. Much better than most of the pay for movie channels that have become bogged down with their own brands of internal advertisement.

If it hadn't been for the Blue Bird having a satellite dish, I probably would never have gone that route. I do find it pretty cool when I can pull down Direct in the middle of a parking lot or field though.

Bill h makes a good point, the installers are subcontracted to do the installs. To be fair, my parents had Dish Network installed a few months ago and those installers did a great job. They even came back a few months later and helped program the remote to work with a new TV my parents bought.