Daniel's TV Blog

I don't have ABC any more. DISH Network and KOMO, the Seattle affiliate, are not playing nice right now. KOMO, which gets its bandwidth for free from the government, is demanding a really high per subscriber fee from DISH Network to rebroadcast their channel. Since they get all their revenue from the commercials on the over the air broadcast (from the bandwidth given to them by the government for free) all money they demand from me and other DISH subscribers is pure profit. Did I mention that my taxes pay for their over the air bandwidth?

So now I can't watch many of my favorite shows on TV any more. No Desperate Housewives. No Ugly Betty. And starting next week, no LOST. I will have to watch these shows online. Eff You channel 4.

Labels: DISH, KOMO

I love DISH Network. I've had them for over eight years. I even paid a $5 a month fee to keep my account active while I lived in the rental house. I'm one of their top customers, according to the recording. But never in my experience with them have they been able to do something on the first trip out. I've just come to expect it as part of doing business with them. Wednesday morning they came out to install the new tuner and pull a new line so I could record two things at ounce from the new DVR. Of course they didn't have a ladder tall enough to reach the DISH. So we rescheduled for Friday afternoon. No problem. In the mean time I decided to play around with the DishPlayer 7200 that I love so very much. After removing and replacing the SIM card, pulling out and putting back in the hard drive, and blowing out all the dust I plugged it back in and it worked right away. This was a big shocker to me. I cancelled my DISH upgrade. HD will have to wait for later this year.

In addition I went to Best Buy and bought a new VCR. They only sell DVD/VCR combos now which is fine since I have a super crappy $20 DVD player that sometimes can't play HBO shows. I don't know why it's only the HBO shows but it had a problems with some episodes of Six Feet Under and Rome. The funny thing about current VCRs is they don't have tuners any more. No more coax. They only have RCA ins so you need to use an external tuner. Everything is going digital next year anyway so that make sense to me. I bought a Toshiba because my preferred brand JVC wasn't available at Best Buy.

Labels: DISH, VCR

So first it was my projector that died. That was a costly and annoying fix. Then last week my final VCR went to VCR heaven. I don't use it to record any more but I have loads of stuff on tape I'd like to convert to digital media at some point. Did you know the only VCRs they sell now are combo DVD players? And the VCRs don't even have tuners.

But today is the ultimate tragedy. My beloved DishPlayer 7200 malfunctioned. I got this just about eight years ago when I first got DISH network. It still has my favorite interface of all the DVRs I've ever used. I swapped out the hard drive but that wasn't the problem. It's just dead. This make me so very sad. DISH is coming on Wednesday to get me a new tuner. Hopefully HD will fill the void. I'm not confident that this will go well.

Labels: DISH