[quote name='caltab']Hey man, I'd love for it to be as simple as not having a satellite dish, but I am telling you that has not been their policy in the past. I don't know about the apartment argument, I think that actually might work.
Their core business is selling satellite service, not sunday ticket. Sunday ticket has always been one of their biggest ways to get people to sign up for direct tv. If they made sunday ticket widely available independent of direct tv they could lose a ton of current and potential customers that sign hefty contracts that are worth far more then the price of sunday ticket.
Also, I direct tv was just
sued by comcast over the way they advertise Sunday ticket as Free.[/QUOTE]
The apartment/rental home argument could work. But a landlord cannot ban a dish from a lessee they can only limit where a dish is placed. This is a FCC rule to allow Satellite companies to compete with cable better. So my guess is they will want you to have in writing where you are legally allowed to put a dish, then they will come out and see if they can get a signal. If they can, you'll be out of luck with that argument. I could see them forgoing this in a place like New York where they know they can't get a signal because your on the 3rd floor surrounded by skyscrapers.
The tree one could work as well, but I think that one would be much harder. DTV will mount their dishes on your house, on poles, and can use tons of cabling from the dish to get your signal to your house. So again, I think they would want to come out and literally if they can find a signal from anywhere on your property (regardless if you wanted the dish there) I'd think they would say you can access it.
I had DTV at one point so I'm pretty sure I'm excluded
. But they utilize things like the Sunday Ticket to jack their prices. After the initial year period at both DTV and Dish (what I have now) I'm saving $15 a month with Dish and the packages are very similar in content. I got DTV thinking I could get Sunday Ticket since I'm dislocated from my teams viewing area but could never justify the cost of getting it. Plus their one year discounts are pretty good deals. It's just too bad their price increases so much after the "new customer" period.
Side note, I saw all these people online claiming they talked DTV down on Sunday Ticket to $190 or less. So I'm out of contract and threatening to leave and we are in game 8 of the season. I'm thinking I can use this as leverage to get a good deal on Sunday Ticket and keep DTV for a while. LOL big time. They wouldn't give it to me for less than $230, so I said goodbye. Their whole argument was that the people that paid $329 (I think) for 17 weeks or $19.35 a game were going to get a better deal than me because they got on the subscription early and that was their "best price" offer. So $230/9 games or $25.56 was as good as they could do for me. This is a reasonable argument, until you look at the fact that the last person in always gets the best satellite deal. All of their deals are for "new customers", not existing customers. Just thought it was ironic. Just like all their loyal Sunday Ticket subscribers are paying $329 for Sunday Ticket, while all new customers get it for free. Yep, those people that got in early and support your business definitely get the best deal.
The Sunday Ticket for Free is misleading as well. The fine print clearly says it is free for one year, they should say that in the ads they are running. Not surprised Comcast is suing since they are probably losing customers, but I could see this as a class action suit later as well. Probably tons of people signing up because Sunday Ticket is "Free" with DTV subscribership (or so the ads say) and come year two they have to fork over a bunch of cash to get it.
