Let me preface this by saying I’ve been an off-and-on customer since their second year of existence in 1995. Going back to cable television after DirecTV is like going from DSL back to dial-up. That being said, DirecTV is a superior product, that is, when you can get it.
I’ve given up on trying to get high definition service from DirecTV. The first time I tried was in late December after getting my new Akai widescreen TV. I took the afternoon off from work and the guy who was supposed to come and install the new dish and receivers never showed up.
Many apologies and two more installer visits later, I still don’t have hi-def, and as the Red Sox season progresses, and with the Patriots season looming, I am nothing less than pissed. The installers that DirecTV contracts with claims they can’t get a line of sight with the hi-def satellites.
A couple of weeks ago, my across-the-street neighbor and I had breakfast at the local coffee shop. He’s telling me how wonderful his hi-def DirecTV service is. He also tells me of a DirecTV installer whose business is a couple of towns over. I contacted him and today he comes to my house, looks into the sky and tells me I CAN have hi-def service.
He also told me that the company in my area (DirecTV contracts installations out to) pays by the installation. Thus, if a job will take too long, they won’t do it. And as the job is being done quickly, a customer may have a few unsightly wires hanging around their home’s exterior.
With this good news, I finally get through to a DirecTV representative and I tell her a DirecTV-licensed installer can do the job. It is then I am told that unless I use the lazy, lying contracting company, I can’t get the bigger HD dish installed. I find this amazing how we can put a man on the moon but DirecTV will essentially spit on a long-time customer. I can’t be alone.
Maybe I’d get some attention if I screamed racism…?
A warning to DirecTV: It’s this kind of contempt for customers that make the superior ordinary. Take a look at what was the American automobile industry….
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I haven’t had cable/satellite in years. (Too many young children in the house.) But the kids are getting older, and I’ve thought about getting it again.
Until I caught a Direct TV commercial earlier this week (during Leno, I believe). It showed a young woman, with some sort of webcam, refusing to undress for some young men unless they subscribed to DirectTV and it’s intertnet/cable services.
Scratch them off my list.
Bob
I hate to keep seemingly running off at the mouth here, but there are a lot of issues involved.
I checked and the old embargo of HD equipment by the internet sites has passed and they sell the same equipment now.
If you look at the state of the art, the actual worst case condition due to the number of satellites used for all the bandwidth required and which bird your local stations come off of you can be saddled with up to a 5 LNB dish to fully get the programming you want. Since you are near Boston that is not an issue and a 3 LNB dish should provide all you need, because of which birds feed your locals and HD content.
Having said that the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater if you are a Hispanic customer and you want the Hispanic channels programming. This is strictly due to which birds broadcast those signals.
Also the new birds going up are going to stir the mix.
The end user customer has no clue as to what all is involved into getting the signal from point A to Point B. They only want to get it. A good and fair concept. However the install tech pays the price in the added complexity of the install and the more critical dish aiming requirements to catch all those birds with one dish.
Bob
I just reread your story.
I haven’t had the chance to work for DirecTV contractors for about 3 years, but unless the policy has changed, none of the local contractors are supposed to be able to touch you.
You are an existing DirecTV customer and they are not allowed to do upgrades or installs for prior DirecTV customers.
DirecTV maintains their own group of installation techs for the existing or prior customer base so they don’t have to pay out royalty payments to the contractor companies.
Something ain’t right here.
Bob
If you don’t really have a line of sight problem there is a work around.
You can go out on the net and buy the same equipment, (except some stuff that DirecTV embargoes) and get an installer from that other place to do it as a “side job” under the table.
I don’t know if the HD DVR’s have reached the internet market yet or even the HD boxes, last time I looked it was the standard definition stuff.
Remember when a contractor installs a system, he gets paid a set amount for a standard installation. He is free to negotiate extra work beyond the install parameters of that which is well documented, such as extra long trenching, wall fishes to run cables through walls and installation of additional phone drops to service the boxes. The contractor he is working for makes no money on the install, in fact it is an up front loss. His take is on the two year percentage of programing revenues he gets as long as the customer stays active. Plus he gets hit with charge backs if the customer bails in the first 3 or 4 months.
All of the low hanging fruit are gone, now it’s not a pretty sight either for installers or their contractors.
The only place you can still make money is in a high growth area with lots of new construction.
When I first started the company provided all the material, now the tech has to pay for the cable and all the other stuff except for the dish itself and the boxes installed.
In today’s environment the only “gravy” installs are the ones where you have a new customer who never had direcTV before and a dish is already sitting on top the house when you arrive and you only have to maybe change out the dish to a newer type or add a couple of new runs into the house for additional locations. Many times all I had to do was walk in , hook up the single box or maybe a double into already wired locations , start up the service and train the new user on the basics.
In and out in under 40 minutes.
I have also had installs from hell that took as much as three days to complete the job because of all the extra work required beyond a typical install and charged for the additional issues accordingly.
As a long time DirecTV installer, the issue you seem to be running into is authorized franchise areas.
DTV has a lot of strange rules as to who can do what.
For example if someone drops their service, a DTV contractor can not later pick them up as a “new” customer. If they ever had DTV before, they have to be reinstalled by a DirecTV technician only. Not a contractor who owns that service franchise area.
I have been doing installs since the days when DirecTV bought out PrimeStar and we did all the conversion installs to bring the system all under one roof. Over the years I have installed over 3000 DTV systems. I work shipyards normally which is up and down schedule work and do DirecTV as a fill job in the down times.
A lot of install techs will look at the difficulty of the upgrade and how much time it will take versus how much he will be paid for the upgrade work. If he judges it non cost effective they falsely claim, no line of sight.
Companies I work for will send a QA guy out for a line of site check and if it is wrong will direct another installer to do the job and dock the false claim against the original installer.
In my years of installation I have only had 3 or 4 true line of sight no goes, but then I work mainly in rural areas which don’t have a lot of building obstructions etc that could raise that figure.
I have had one customer who had to at their own cost have a 50 foot mast installed to mount the dish on to clear a line of pine trees on the next property.
Bob!
This is terrible! I have been a customer of theirs for over 10 years now. You need to raise cain with them and tell them about the “installer” and get his license to install revoked because he has blown you off twice and to recommend one who will do the job. I hate that there are such lazy bums out there (especially in the “contractor” business but if DirectTV doesn’t treat you better than that by taking care of their good customers, I would raise a stink as public as you can and tell them to kiss your a** and that you will get the word out that they don’t care about their customers!
Maybe you should point them to this website and tell them you have half a million readers and this could affect their business if they don’t provide you with the service you have requested muy pronto! Or have that other installer call them and get something set up. I think the installers can contact them to get it going!