OMG – DirecTV, why do you suck so bad?
Its been quite a while since I went on a rant. These days I pride myself in remaining calm and collected, unlike my younger days when I could blow a gasket at any moment. However there are some things that can really set me off. Today it is DirecTV. People pay a ton of money to these guys, so why can’t they make a decent product?
What makes me so angry:
- I’m a Star Trek fan so I have no excuse. Scotty said “Fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me”. So shame on me. DirecTV sucked the first time I had it and it still does. I let people convince me to give it a shot, plus I live in a Comcast area and everyone says they suck. So I went with DirecTV and yep – they suck. I guess this really counts more as being mad at myself for being gullible.
- I paid to have 3 HD DVR’s installed. I got 2.5 installed. Apparently the 3rd receiver was just too much and the installer blew off installing the second line. Now I can’t record something and watch something else and of course this is on my bedroom receiver where I always want to do this.
- DirectTV is only second to Microsoft for how many updates it pushes out to its receivers and for how this totally screws you (the customer) over. Many times these updates require hard reboots. Often it can take 20-45 minutes to get back to watching TV. Of course this seems to happen most of the time during important things like ALCS games, presidential debates, etc. I missed most of the game tonight waiting for the piece of junk…
- Customer support? What’s that? You’ll have better luck getting out a soldering iron and having at the receiver. Their web page says it all. Just try to find a link to support or a phone number. You gotta dig that up. On and online chat? Huh – what’s that?
- Freezing channels: on certain channels you will get hesitations and “freeze framing”. This will happen on different channels on different receivers. Maybe the Lord of the Nazgul is flying overhead and blocking the satellite signal?
- Rebooting a receiver takes forever. If you ever lose power for just a moment or need to reset your receiver get ready to wait 20-45 minutes before the TV comes back on.
- Last but not least – the “guide” and the rest of the functions on the remote. What a piece of crap. Could the scrolling on the guide be any slower? Why is it so slow? What’s in this stupid box – an 8086 processor? Sheesh. Not to mention the unintuitive buttons on the remote and the fact that of the three TV’s I have none of the them work right with the stupid remotes. We’re not talking strange TV’s either: Panasonic, Samsung, and Toshiba.
I have only myself to blame. I had DirecTV before. I left because they wouldn’t give current customers the same HD upgrades they were giving to new customers. They also didn’t really care about image quality when we kept having satellite issues.
So I should have known that once they have you signed up that they couldn’t give a crap about you. I guess tomorrow I’ll call them and hang out on hold for a while and then maybe get someone to placate me, but of course do nothing to fix any of my real issues with the service.
I totally agree with you. We had DirecTV way back when they had real Tivos. Life was good. Dish lured us away for a bit and we just came back. DirecTV’s DVR is total crap. The scrolling DOES take forever and we have problems with the audio getting out of sync with the video on the HD channels. DirecTV’s solution: REBOOT. Our unit takes at least 10 minutes for every reboot. Occasionally, our DVR forgets that we pay buttloads of money to get the HD channels and refuses to show them while giving me some cryptic numerical error. Guess how to fix that? That’s right, REBOOT. Sadly, DirecTV’s service is slightly better than DishNetwork or Charter cable, so that’s who we stick with.
Coole Seite und sehr informativ!!!
Vielen Dank. Ich mag den Namen Ihrer Website! “Satanlagen”, die eine ganz andere Bedeutung als würde hier in den USA haben. 🙂
I got Directv back in 2000. Bought my setup at Circuit City that had two Hughes receivers and the dish. And the service was decent. But in 2013, I was told the old receivers would no longer work and I had to use their new ones. Since that time the receivers would black out for 3-4 seconds then come back on. This got progressively worse. I called several times, complained, and got nothing from them. Once it rebooted by itself. In the old days, if you knew someone, they could program the cards and you could get different channels. When they switched to the new receivers, you couldn’t do this. That’s why I think they black out. They send signals to check the cards. The new ones suck big time. The guide is different. The old remotes were so easy to use. And the price was decent. The AT&T thing ruined it all. Anything to make a buck including their “regional sports fee”. Just greed. You’d get better customer service from a monkey.