So, after being a good customer of satellite tv for over 19 years, I am finally fed up with the ever increasing cost of my tv bill. So, before I get into the details of my rant, here’s a little history of my tv viewing:
Growing up where I live, tv options were limited. My area didn’t even get cable until I was in elementary school so unlike a lot of kids, I never had Sesame Street and PBS programming as a kid. I had NBC, ABC, and CBS. That’s it. I remember when my family first got cable when it became available and it was like.. wow! I discovered Nickelodeon and Nick-At-Nite and so much more. Compared to three channels, basic cable was awesome and this was how my tv viewing was until I graduated high school and got my first job while starting college. I remember discovering the option of affordable satellite tv, not the c-band stuff, and signing up for Dish Network in 1998. my mind was further blown when I discovered sci-fi and found all the Star Trek’s beyond the original series and movies and Buffy the Vampire, the series. My biggest discovery was Stargate SG-1 and Babylon 5. I was truly in Nirvana. This was still before the advent of DVR and I remember spending so much time creating timers on a VCR and dreading the evil power loss that would wipe out all your timers. Ugh.
So I stuck with Dish Network until the early 2000’s when DVR’s starting coming out and back then getting new receivers was expensive existing customers so I made the change to DirectTV for a new DVR receiver and a discount on my monthly bill. I had nothing against Dish, it was just that I wanted a DVR and it was cheaper to swap than to purchase. I loved the simplicity of having a DVR verses VCR and the guide and overall interface was great. Beyond that, I was happy with DirectTV and stayed with them until Dish offered the first Hopper. It was a big jump in technology and once again it was cheaper to change back to Dish than it was to get the DirectTV equivalent Genie that wasn’t even out yet. So I went back to Dish and have been there since with one upgrade along the way to the Hopper 3 (I skipped Hopper with Sling) and over time I started added more channels by going to higher packages with discounts and adding Joey’s for my other TVs.
This brings us to current day and my Dish bill is ridiculously expensive. I will admit it is not all Dish’s fault as I have upgraded programming over the years which raised the price and then added additional TVs which also raised the monthly bill but Dish has not been shy it raising it’s own costs and changing channels from one package to another so customers had to get bigger packages in order to keep channels they’ve grown to love so thus my problem of a huge bill that I really need to get control over. Continued in Part 2…..