Quote Originally Posted by Eden View Post
We've had DirectTV with Tivo since around 97 or 98 I guess. We've never had any problems - and our customer service has been excellent (especially with Tivo). We don't have a lot of heavy weather here though - It can cut out momentarily if a big strong rain or snow storm rolls through (this has only happened once the whole time we've had ours - but we *rarely* get thunderstorms). We did have to brush our dish off a couple of times the one year it snowed a whole lot.
This is basically my experience, though we've only been with DirecTV since 2005. Thunderstorms or serious heavy rain/snow can interrupt the signal and you do have to remove snow from the dish after it piles up; regular overcast/cloudy days aren't an issue. Unobstructed view of the southern sky is the only real requirement.

We haven't really had to deal with DirecTV customer service much, but I haven't really considered it any different than any other phone/cable company (grin and bear it ). We went with DirecTV because of the quantity of total channels and the quantity of HD channels for the price. We also originally went DirecTV because they had a TiVo HD dual-tuner receiver, but right now that's not the case - it's a DirecTV HD DVR or TiVo non-HD. Come January they'll have another DirecTV HD TiVo out.

Probably a wash between Dish and DirecTV. Most of our neighbors with satellite have DirecTV, but I have one co-worker on Dish that seems to have the same experiences we do.