A friend of mine has DirecTV and I have Dish. I would prefer Dish any day. DirecTV is full of all sorts of crap that I doubt that many people use. All of this crap is just a constant source of confusion to my friend. Being able to record to a VCR thru an IR blaster by just selecting it on the grid is a great feature that DirecTV does not have. I also have the Dish PVR 501 and love it. I just cannot see why anyone would want to pay $10 a month for Tivo features. Dish just added a search function that works just great. Until recently, Dish has offered more HDTV channels than DirecTV
Tony