A short experience with Dish Network
Report from Lionel Space, Phoenix AZ

While at a home show in Phoenix on January 11, 2019, we were approached by a salesman offering Dish Network satellite TV service. At the time we had been a long time subscriber to DirecTV satellite TV. The advantages that convinced us to sign a contract and switch were a lower price for a similar package and 16 tuners compared to 5 for the DirecTV hardware. During prime time, we occasionally had met the limit of the 5 tuners (mostly due to overlaps at the beginning and end of a minute), but we also have a second DVR with another 2 tuners, so this could be managed with a little extra effort.

First Impressions:
The physical dish was a bit smaller, so there was less visibility of it on the roof. The DVR box was about 50% larger, but the Joey for the second TV was very small.

The remote was not as intuitive, with fewer buttons, not as ergonomic (straight sides) and needing more visible association to get to the right control (although back lighting upon movement helped with that). I really like the toggle buttons for volume and channel on the DirecTV remote with the mute to the left of the volume toggle (easy to use by just feel). The dish remote is all flat and the mute is right below the Recall button (which jumps you back to a different program) and the pause button is just above the Recall button, so it is very easy to accidentally hit Recall.

The recorded show presentation was only by icons (no list view), so it took more hunting through the selections to finally decide what to watch. DirecTV will also show you in the list view of a single show, how far you've already progressed in a show that was partially watched.
When picking a show, Dish has you select the show, go down to the show, hit select, go down (once or 3 times depending on whether it is still live, so inconsistent) and then press select; on DirecTV, you go the show and press Select and play begins. After watching a show, DirecTV immediately provides the option to delete the show, but with Dish you have to go up, over, over to highlight Delete and then press Select.
When scrolling Schedule and Timer lists, DirecTV is much faster to escape out of menus and to navigate.

Picture quality was different, where the Dish backgrounds were softer, making the prominent images more differentiated and the backgrounds looking fake. Information in forums indicates that DirecTV has more bandwidth and thus needs less compression, so more of the original program is presented.

Usability was not as friendly. While watching a show and jumping over commercials, it immediately goes to the new time slot; while this may be faster than the quick scrolling of DirecTV, you also completely miss any indication of something that happened during that commercial period that may have actually been of interest (like previews of other shows or movies); plus DirecTV would indicate how far into the show you had progressed, where Dish presented nothing and one would have to do an extra step of pausing and unpausing to get that information. The Dish remote also uses the same buttons for 30 second time skip and fast forward, so if you press the button with the intention of 30 seconds just a bit too long, you're all of a sudden spinning at 15x speed instead: DirecTV has separate buttons for these functions.

Problems:
While some of the above differences were tolerable, we could not continue with Dish service due to it's many problems, the main being the recording of shows. We contacted Dish after a couple of weeks and a tech was sent out, where he realigned the dish, tested all the cables, and installed a new Hopper 3, assuring us that it would resolve the problems. However, we immediately saw (before he even left), that the problems persisted. He called the engineer who said they were aware of our problems and to wait a couple of days and it should update the system. After a couple of days, the problem persisted and on the phone I was passed to a level 3 engineer who had me do an update on the unit and said to wait a couple of days. The problems persisted and in fact got worse.

We had set up about 50 timers to record new shows that are broadcast at regular intervals, but after a while we noticed that many of them were not being recorded. We would look at the schedule to see what we should expect for that night as well as the next night and noticed that some shows were missing from the schedule. When examining the show, it showed it as New in the upper area with a red background, but in the lower left, it showed the recording as being skipped because it was not New (when in fact it was); sure enough that show did not record and we watched it live instead. We had other shows on a News channel that are New every Monday through Friday, but several days a week on several of the show, they were being skipped; one of them would record the Friday show and record it again on Saturday, but had skipped Tuesday through Thursday. Ultimately about 25% of the shows were being skipped for not being New when they actually were.

We saw one night that Hawaii 5-0 was not going to be recorded (again saying not New), so just before it started we went to Live TV on that channel and as soon as it started to play, we pressed the Record button on the remote (the small diamond in the lower left); we checked the guide and it showed a red dot indicating it was recording; we checked the DVR recordings and it was on the list. We then went to another show that was being skipped (because the Hopper 3 had deleted it from the timer list without our knowledge) and watched that live. However, when we went back to watch Hawaii 5-0, the DVR said it had an error and it would not play.

On the last night we had the unit, 3 of the shows recorded from the timers, but when we went to watch them, the list for them would just spin and never give us the selection to watch them; so all 3 were lost.

The Dish remote allows you to set timers by Voice command. One of the first shows we entered was Charmed so that we could watch all the re-runs. It found it, showed the icon, and we set it for Reruns and New and to keep all (rather than 20). It typically broadcasts several different episodes each day and should have starting accumulating quickly. After several days there were no recordings. I had to go to the guide, find a Charmed episode, and set up recording the series by selecting it before any of them would record from the timer.

On DirecTV I can set up a recording for "Cycling" on the HR24 and it will magically record any sporting event that has cycling in it. Dish has no idea how to do that (I set it up and it did not record the stage race that came up); I have to periodically scan the two channels most likely to have those events and manually set them to record.

Even after having the second tech check everything out, we still had problems with bad reception (we have absolutely no trees or obstructions and Phoenix has few weather problems). On live TV, we'd get a big burp of pixelation about once an hour. Some recorded shows were intolerable where every 15 seconds it would hiccup in some way. DirecTV with the same cabling and dish location has none of these problems with our Genie.

After several 45 minute phone calls and an afternoon having a tech check everything out, we were fortunate to have a case worker cancel our contract after 21 days without the usual $20/month penalty for the remaining 23 months. Since they were unable to deliver the service that we had contracted for, this was the only reasonable resolution. I still had to pay for the 3 weeks of poor service that we had with them. So we lost money, rather than saving along with a poorer viewing experience and additional stress. I am glad I had not cancelled my DirecTV service and after re-installing the dish and DVR, we were back to quality TV watching again.