DirecTV is Great, but...

We initially had Brighthouse for Internet, television and phone when we moved into our house. It was a little frustrating having 3 HD televisions and only one HD receiver. At that time we also had 2 standard televisions also. I decided to switch to DirecTV because of a number of factors.

The DirecTV picture quality was explained to be better in HD than Brighthouse, but they were going to provide us with a receiver for each room of the house. The rate was great, but after a while we realized that the HD reception from the HD DVR was that much better than the SD on the HD televisions in our offices. This was about 3 months into our contract and DirecTV refused to work with us to improve those two receivers.

A few months later I was using my favorite Craigslist app and found someone listing receivers. After I bought the 2 HD DVR receivers from him, I took them home to install them and found that I paid for new receivers, but they were leased as the ones that I would have got from DirecTV when I felt their cost was too high. The other drawback was it was starting our 2 year contract over again. Therefore the guy was a dealer and he did get me a much better deal that what I could have achieved dealing with DirecTV directly.

We have been very happy with the programming with DirecTV and the quality of the picture. The problem everyone worries about is not being able to watch television when it is raining. We live in Florida where we will go 4 straight weeks of afternoon thunderstorms, but I am very happy to say that rain doesn't affect the picture due to the new technology with the new satellite dish. The only time we lose connection is when it is pouring down rain in which time we might not be able to watch live television for 30 minutes at the most. This occurs when we are home and watching television about 2 to 4 times each year.

I am sure that our service goes out due to extreme weather much less than Brighthouse customers lose service as we are still Internet customers with Brighthouse and many days we can be home working and the Internet goes down without bad weather. It appears to happen once every other week. If the Internet goes out that often, I understand by my father wants to have rabbit ears for when the cable goes out.

The only complaint that about DirecTV is about the billing. When you sign up, they lock in your rate for 12 months, but you have a 24 month contract. The customer service representative many times don't have the ability to make your rate that much better, so you have to threaten to cancel your service. At that point you get someone special who can do special things to make you happy within reason. After you have passed your first 12 months, you have to call them every 6 months to do the same. It gets to be very annoying, but the service is the best.

At the end of our first  2 year contract, I was interested in whole home DVR service as advertised on the television where you can record in one room and watch it in another room. For a fee of about $100, they sent out an installer to install the whole home service which connects all DVR's to the internet and they also included a new top of the line DVR unit. This made us very happy as we now have 4 DVR's that we can record and watch television from.

The only way I would consider leaving DirecTV is if we can move to Internet television in HD. We appear to be close to that point when you combine Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime and Netflix. The missing aspect is watching sports which can be accomplished by subscribing to NBA, NFL and/or MLB premium service to watch online, through a computer and/or a smart device. I expect things to get better within the next year and we may drop DirecTV, but it sure is nice to pause live TV whenever we want with our DVR's.

If you would like to give DirecTV a try, please use our referral coupon below to get an extra $10/month off. I would recommend asking for a discount for electronic billing and another for automatic payment. Some don't want to and some still have flip phones.