Tales and thoughts from the founder of NormSoft (maker of Pocket Tunes), working and living in St. Croix, USVI

Friday, October 24, 2008

DISH Network vs. Cox Cable

In case anyone is wondering, DISH Network's DVR interface is far and away better than Cox Cable's. When we signed up for Cox, I tried to find some information on the web about which DVR was better, and I couldn't find any.

I've only been using the Cox DVR for a few days, but here are the deficiencies compared to Dish Networks's DVR:

1. Recorded episodes are displayed in a small confusing list, all jumbled together. Dish's DVR uses the full screen and sorts them nicely by show name.

2. Cox's remote doesn't have a skip forward/back button like Dish has. So to skip commercials, you have to use the fast forward button and hope to time it just right. It's a pain in the ass and takes longer.

3. I haven't found a good way to get episode information about a particular episode on Cox. With DISH, you can get the episode ID, brief description, and many movies have star ratings. Lots more info to figure out what you want to watch.

4. DISH has a special type of recording (I think it's called a season pass or something like that) where you just enter the name of the show/movie, and it records anything matching that name on any channel. I can't find anything like this on Cox.

5. The quality of the high definition channels doesn't seem to be as good. I think Cox has the compression turned way up.

It looks like we have a couple of options. We can either switch to DISH Networks or we can give Tivo a try. It looks like the latest TiVo boxes support SD and HD recording on two channels at once if you use a CableCard decoder from your cable company. I'll have to check with Cox to see if they offer that.

7 comments:

Jeff Loomis said...

If you get the TiVo there is no skip button for commercials either, but there is a "secret" code to enable a 30 second skip.

http://www.weaknees.com/30/

We have the TiVo HD and it works great. I like it much better than the Dish DVR my Mom has but I have heard opposing opinions.

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Elias said...

Just from personal experience (I'm not only a DISH customer but I work at one of the call centers, too)I can tell you DISH is by far superior. DISH dual-tuner receiver has won awards from PC Magazine and also CNET's Editor's Choice Award, and has the largest DVR hard drive in the industry. It can provide Picture-in-Picture features without any additional equipment and indeed has a Skip Forward button that SO MANY other providers lack. For more info go to www.dish.com

Elias said...

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