What Should This DirecTV User Do?
Just today I received the following email. Since I’m not a DirecTV user I thought it would be a good idea for me to post the question here in order to see what other people who have DirecTV think.
I am writing with what may be an easy question to answer, but I am not current on my Tivo knowledge. I know that you do not run a “Q&A” service, but I’ve seen your blog, and I thought you might be able to point me in the right direction.
A few years ago, I got Tivo and DirecTV for the first time. I got one Sony SAT-T60 DIRECTV Satellite receiver (35 hour TiVo) for the living room, plus I got non-Tivo Hughes receivers for the other rooms. My wife and I fell in love with Tivo. We love it. But we never upgraded or anything. Aside from having not enough storage capacity, we loved our Sony T60 and thought it worked seamlessly with DirecTV.
Fast-forward to today. My wife says she wants one and only one thing for her birthday: Tivo in the bedroom, to go along with the Tivo in the living room. So I call DirecTV and ask. They are sly. They do not immediately tell me that what they are selling me their own dvr, not Tivo, but I ask them directly and finally they admit it. But they also tell me their dvr “works just like Tivo.”
They install it.
Two weeks later, my wife and I are so disappointed in the product. It basically has many of the same functions as Tivo, but it is so user-unfriendly. We hate it.
So what are our options? We really think the way to go is a unified Tivo/satellite receiver, but it seems that no one makes them anymore (we assume because DirecTV is the 800-pound gorilla that caused this). We understand that DirecTV still supports old Tivo machines, like our living room one, but that we are not permitted to hook up a new one.
Should I ditch DirecTV? Should I buy a used DirecTV/Tivo machine and try to get DirecTV to provide service (somehow I doubt that would work)? Please point me in the right direction.
Mike
