I swtiched over and love it. I have the best package, but if you go with a lower tier you can get all the sports stations for about $10 a month. I can watch football from every conference and see every coach show on the planet (talk about boring). ESPN Classic in included.

I have TWC with HD ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN Classic, Versus, and FSN (plus channel 8 which if I recall shows small time games occasionally?). This pretty much covers all games except for those with directional state opponents. The problem with television providers as I see it is there is not enough competition because of barriers to entry. I have my choice between TWC and Grande as ATT does not service my complex. DirecTV is also out as my condo faces northwest and is unable to accommodate a dish. Such is life.

I have Comcast and while it has been a pain sometimes, it is significantly cheaper than Verizon Fios and Direct TV in my area (plus I need internet as well). The regular prices aren’t cheaper, but every 6 months they try to bump me up to the regular price and I tell them I won’t pay that and they hook me up with another 6 month (or sometimes 1 year) deal which is substantially cheaper. I don’t get ESPNU, but I could for a few extra bucks. I just figure all of those games seem to be on ESPN360, which comcast now gets in my area.

Which is a big plus. The other day I was watching a movie downstairs, turned off the tv/receiver, went upstairs to the spare bedroom to watch in bed, and it picks up right where I turned it off.

I came from Dish Network, which I loved, but wanted to go to fiber, so here are my thoughts in going from Dish Network to AT&T.

1. AT&T’s standard def stuff looks better, no question. Their HD looks good too, but they have some issues with their image processing that makes things like slow shots of zoomed out grass fuck up every 2 seconds as it re-decodes the image. *Note – I have a very critical eye for this sort of thing (I was pissed at compression artifacts in my Finding Nemo DVD), my wife thinks the AT&T HD looks better than Dish.

2. The HD Channels are in a separate number zone from the standard channels. I dont know what you are accustomed to, Im pretty sure that TWC does it this way as well. Say ESPN2 is channel 606, then ESPN2 HD is channel 1606. Easy enough? Well yes, but I spend all my time browsing the 1000’s channels, as I dont give a shit about standard def. This is both in the guide, and flipping channels. Dish has the channels doubly listed, for instance, if I were to hit 160 for ESPN, id arrive on ESPNHD. If for some reason I wanted the Standard Def version of the channel (more applicable to TNT and other heathens who refuse to NOT FUCKING STRETCH SD VIDEO), I just hit channel down. Then when browsing, Im browsing all my channels at once, not just those limited to HD.

3. The DVR skip on AT&T is annoying. On dish, it was forward 30s, back 10s. On AT&T its forward 45s, back 7s. Why does this matter? Ill record football games that I want to watch, but dont need to hear all the commentary. With a 30s skip, if you hit it right when a dude gets tackled, it starts again with QB under center. You can watch every single play of a game in about 30 minutes this way. With the AT&T dvr, I have to hit forward, then watch for the play to start, then hit back. It still works, but it doubles my button presses, and makes me have to pay attention more. Which annoys me. Also, the AT&T skip scans, not really skips, so its slower, and you see intermittant images. Which is actually necessary since its a 45s skip, and allows you to hit back when you see them line up. I read that they used to have the skip at 30s, so maybe it will be back one day.

4. This is my last nitpick, but when I hit channel up, I want my channel number to increase, always. Dish did this just fine. AT&T, in the guide lists the channels from top to bottom. So to go from channel 1 to channel 2, you press down. OK, I can deal. But what if you dont use the guide? Well then you press UP to go from Channel 1 to channel 2. Wha? Yes, depending on your screen, your channel up and down buttons will reverse functionality. This is retarded. Just list my channels in the guide from bottom to top, and we are good.

5. Ok good things, I have the big 10 network again. Not that I love big ten football, but its nice to have Akron vs NW in glorious HD, when Texas is on PPV. Dish started to charge extra for non-regional B10N, I got it as part of my package with AT&T.

6. Sports Multiview, they have a app where you can have 3 or 4 sports channels on the side, while watching one bigger in the center, allowing you to quickly and easily switch between then. This is kinda cool, but its not the HD feeds so…. meh. It is nice if there are more than 2 games that I’m interested in keeping up with, and want to drain my remote batteries by constantly switching. Theres also a news multiview, but I have never, and will never try that.

7. Additional shit. If you have a home phone, theres cool shit to do with that and your TV, like see people calling, voicemails etc. You can attach your U-Verse to your Flickr account and show people pictures of your exploits at halftime juts by changing channels. And the biggest one for me, you can say fuck you to the cable companies and their mutually agreed upon monopoly. By supporting their competition perhaps we will finally see them improve their product. Its started already, but the more the merrier. Also the Internet through U-Verse is better.

8. Oh yeah almost forgot, the online control of the DVR for U-Verse is the best ive seen so far. I also like that the DVR will write over programs as necessary to record what you are trying to record. On Dish, if you ran out of space, it would just stop recording. You can also set shows to not be overwritten automatically to prevent that from happening to your VY judged Beauty Contests.

I’m pretty critical, but U-Verse is a good product, and I would whole heartedly support AT&T, Verizon, DIsh, or DirectTV over ever going to Comcrapstic or TimetoboneyouWarner. I may have liked Dish Network slightly better for TV, but the DVR is great, and my freedom from TWC for internet is even greater.

There was a game that I wanted to watch on the CBSSports channel and that seems to be the only channel that AT&T does not have. It was a Kansas game so it wasn’t that important.

But I am a bit of a captive since in addition to Saturday college football I want to watch NFL Sunday Ticket. That exclusive is really paying off for them.

…Not the greatest, but don’t believe all the hype of Uverse either. However, I live in P-Ville where TWC is not available and I had to sign up with Suddenlink (formerly Cox) and it is AWFUL! Internet is intermittent and HD quality on the cable is shitastic. Way worse than TWC. However, Uverse did become available last month and I’m planning to switch over next month so I will update yall on that.
And yes, with satelite, there is still rain fade with some dishes so that CAN be an issue, but not always. Especially since football season is during cloudy, cold, rainy season here in Austin.

You get what you pay for. I live in Houston and had Comcast which you can generally get cheap because of their constant specials. Well after they messed me over on the Horns opening day pay per view game last year I made the switch to U-verse. I have to pay about $15 more a month but it is well worth it. I concur with all of the previous positive and negative stuff that’s already been covered about ATT. One thing to understand with Uverse is that you must have a receiver box for each tv you wish to watch service on. At least that’s what the installer told me. I haven’t taken the time to get up in the attic and mess with just plugging the cable staight into the back of the tv. If that does in fact work like it does with traditional cable I’d be interested to know. Another thing to remember is that there is no perfect service out there. So don’t be discouraged when choose something and find deficiencies. For instance I just loved my Tivo remote features which blows away other companies features. You could do slow mo, go frame by frame, and do other stuff that I now cannot do with ATT. But Tivo’s guide would sometimes not match perfectly with my local programming which would cause shows to not record. There are pros and cons with everything.

We had TWC everywhere for a long ass time. It was horrible. All they give you is the DVR box (if you pay for DVR) and this stupid little modem thing with a bunch of lights on it that have some obscure meaning. If you want wireless, you go buy and set up on your own one of those stupid blue wireless routers from Wal-Mart, or else you pay 10 bucks a month to rent a router from them. NOT TO MENTION they have contract disputes with various channels which you can’t watch. The DVR on-screen menus and even just the box look tacky as hell. You can only get two streams of live TV (you can watch recorded TV while recording two more shows. That sounds like a lot except during football season.

Ugh.

But the good news is we switched to AT&T U-Verse. So much better. The same service is the same price, almost exactly, but the difference is we pay more with U-Verse to get some additional stuff that TWC doesn’t even offer. They come to your house and give you a big “Gateway” which is essentially a router that handles TV and Internet. This thing is great because it provides wireless internet STANDARD! It’s also already set up with a secure password and everything so you don’t have to deal with that. The actual signal comes in through regular phone lines, so they don’t usually have to punch holes in your wall or anything. They will run ethernet cables from wherever you keep the gateway to your TV and to your desktop computer if it doesn’t have wireless (or if you want it to be hella fast), and even staple them to the baseboards or go through walls to keep it out of sight.

Once you’re set up, the internet and everything work great, and they will stay to help you set up your online account to pay bills electronically and you can even schedule recordings online if you’re away from home and are going to miss something. The picture quality has been great, even the standard definition is watchable. You can record FOUR streams of live TV (two of which can be HD) at once. So if there are a bunch of good games on at once, we pick the two best ones and record them in HD and record the others standard. No problems whatsoever. Definitely would recommend AT&T

Hope that helps.

but ATT uverse seems to have better options (choices) but I love the directv iphone app, the sports mix channels (wish they were in HD) and when golf or tennis and other events come up we get the multi-game/court/hole channels all in HD, plus the interactive guide is awesome! but…. my problems with directv: slow response (receiver/controller – expensive after your promo deal is up. plujs i don’t want to re-learn a whole new channel line-up :)

truly do. I am thinking that I will switch to ATT Uverse soon.

But I’ll at least share my experience.

I currently have Dish and really do love it. I rarely lose single even in the worst weather (and it can get bad here), love the DVR and the crystal clear HD. It also seems like there are always channels getting added. I have the top 200 package ($70 per month), and I recently got Versus and ESPNU added. They have all sorts of special out of market channels that I’m actually able to pick up many Texas games that I thought I would otherwise not get. I guess the best part is the monthly bill is always consistent. Actually, I haven’t had it rise at all, rather it has gone down.

Again, sorry for the generic lingo as this isn’t exactly my specialty, but I am very happy with it.

Note that the DirecTV contract has a “grandfather” clause that allows you to keep the service you originally contracted in perpetuity. So you can keep your original rate as long as you don’t change your base service. The trick is that a lot of the automated tools for adding or removing premium services will also reset you to the current package — and charge you the new rate. You need to make the change by phone and tell the rep you want to keep the original base package but add HBO or whatever.

Since I’ve been with DirecTV for 3 years, they gave me three months of something called Sports Pack. So far, I don’t see any point. It does not have ESPNU and the games on all the other Fox regionals are still blacked out. For this people pay $12.95?

One thing I thought I’d throw out there: What the hell is anyone doing with a satellite provider if you live within ANY cable service zones? My favorite thing about DirecTV when I was a kid was how it wouldn’t work in the rain. FAVORITE. I will never use a dish again.

I’ve had my problems with DirecTV, mainly billing errors due to special offers. But the signal quality is great, HD is only $10/month, and they have their own channel with some really good shows. (New season of Friday Night Lights starts next week. One thing I like is that they let you switch from one premium package to another (like HBO to Starz) for free as often as you want. So watch one till you’ve seen all the shows you like and then go to another. Also, they always have special offers and you can usually get them to give you a freebie just for asking. Since they are going head to head with Dish, they are willing to put out incentives to retain their customers.

(I guess this kinda sounds like a sales pitch. And come to think of it, they have a cash offer for signing up new subscribers that I’d be happy to split with anyone …)