Can anyone offer a cost/benefit comparison of cable w/Tivo and satellite (DISH DVR) services?

What are you waiting for? If I had a choice (have Directv, had dish) I’d have a package deal in a second. No snow/rain storm blackouts, no receiver, premium channels with cable for same price.

Very true, I’d go with cable simply cause I hate DSL. (Presuming you got hispeed).

Over the last 10 years I’ve been on-and-off DirecTV and Cable, looking back I’d say I was always more satisfied with the various cable companies while the price (most of the time) was approx. the same for comparable packages.

The main advantages of TiVo over a Satellite DVR is that TiVo allows you to actually move recorded shows around, it’s called TiVo mobile and is priceless, e.g. save a show as mp4 and move it to a PC or external drive.

My main remaining question is, do I need two DVR units to watch it on two TVs, or will one receiver control two TVs like DISH does? And since I’d be switching to cable, I know I’d get it everywhere there’s a cable outlet — but would I get Tivo too?

Thanks, @TaoSan !

I’ve found the cheapest way (for me) to get the internet, phone and TV I want is to get cable internet, with a VOIP account through Vonage and Dish Network w/ DVR. I couldn’t even GET all the channels I get now through Cable and to get what I want/like, it would be a lot more expensive to go with a Cable package deal. I find cable internet to be a superior product to DSL however. And I can get by with a metered account at Vonage, it’s $15 a month (plus $5 a month taxes and fees) for 500 minutes, I almost NEVER go over and when I do it’s like 3 cents a minute. Total cost for me is about $155/mo, but I have HD service w/ DVR in two rooms and the highest level of TV programming you can get without ordering movie channels or sports packages. About $20 for phone, $56 for internet and $79 for TV.

I hadn’t even considered Vonage. I rarely talk on the phone, so that probably would be a great option for us. My concern there is that if the Internet goes down, I won’t have a land line; but I guess I could keep my land line and designate it fax/data. Can you still use it to call on in emergencies if you do that?

BTW, I’m looking for a gorgeous antique French phone. :)

I wondered how many channels and which I could get through cable. I’ll have to go look that up. (I would be happy with zero sports channels, but I don’t know anybody who offers that package. Does anyone here?)

Thanks, @dalepetrie!

I have never had any problems with phone outages, and if you have a cell phone, Vonage will forward your calls to your cell phone.

I have the same issue, I’d love to be able to pick channels a la carte, I keep hearing it promised, but it never happens. I’d get rid of all the sports, religion and stuff like Lifetime and Fox News, and all the country music channels.

The cable companies call them “converter”, and yes, with cable you need one converter per TV. With TiVo, you will be able to watch your recorded shows on the TV set connected to the TiVo receiver.

If you want to watch your recorded shows on a second TV set you have to get a bit creative, streaming via network for example.

As for Vonage, I found Skype to be much cheaper, and for a one-time investment of around 120 you can get a WiFi Skype phone. Skype-out beats Vonage price-wise any time, and the voice quality is the same if you have cable instead of DSL.

Think 100$ for a year of phone service, if at all.

One thing I like about Dish vs. both cable and Directv is that one converter box/DVR operates 2 TVs, and if you subscribe to the top 250 w/ HD I think they don’t even charge a monthly equipment fee (which I believe is only $5 or $6 anyway).

I haven’t yet been brave enough to try Skype, what I like about Vonage is that it works just like a regular telephone with your current phones. It’s super simple to hook up to every phone in the house yourself…basically all you have to do is disconnect the line in from the telephone company (they tell you how to do this, it takes 5 seconds), then when you run the line out from your router to your phone, instead of hooking it to a phone, hook it into the wall jack, and that distributes the phone to every wall jack in the house. And basically, the other great thing is you have EVERY feature you would have to pay between $4 and $12 a month each for with the phone company…caller ID, call waiting, call forwarding, 3 way calling, speed dialing, voice mail (that will also send a copy to up to 6 different email accounts in a wmv file), custom ringtones, etc. You don’t have to worry about wearing a headset, you don’t have to worry about having random numbers show up when you call people, they will automatically forward your calls to any phone you specify in case of an outage, and they have 911 service, you just need to sign up for it, though it’s free. Calls to like 5 countries in Europe and Canada and Mexico are included, and other foreign countries are generally really cheap. You can take the service with you with a portable USB device. I’ve also talked to our tech guy at work who is actually planning to move part of our company to Skype and the main reason he’s not moving the executives to Skype is because even with cable speed internet, there are more dropped calls and more tinny sounding calls with Skype, so I think he’d disagree with TaoSan on that end. It really boils down to how DIY do you want to be. Like I said, $20 a month w/ taxes is less than $250 a year, that extra $150 to me is money well spent…but for some people, that extra savings is worth it.

Dunno, maybe I was just lucky but I never had any bad experience in terms of dropped calls or sound quality.

The main difference between Vonage and Skype is that the Vonage “router” is switched before any other gateway or wireless router, meaning the VOIP service has dedicated bandwidth, whereas Skype uses network bandwidth “behind” a router, therefore sharing it with other devices.

Thus it makes sense to assume that in a networked/business environment the “tinny” a.k.a overcompressed sound may occur if the VOIP service has to “share” bandwidth and tries to compensate with higher compression.

Other than that Skype offers the same features Vonage does now. (I know, I had Vonage before I switched).

Well then, I may have to check it out….last time I looked, it was pretty DIY/piecemeal.