For about seven years I went with the local cable television company here in the Seattle area, which is Comcast. Earlier this year they changed their name to Xfinity and promised the world to all of us Comcast customers, but as far as I can tell the only thing that changes was the monthly service fees. They certainly are convenient, as you can get your cable TV service bundled along with your local phone line and high speed internet access. That is probably why I stayed with them so long, as if you are going to switch to another provider you have to go through the whole ordering and installation process which is time consuming. But after reviewing how many channels were available through Direct TV, I finally made the jump.
There were two packages that I was mainly looking at with the satellite TV option, the Choice Xtra and the Choice Ultimate offers. Basically, they both offer around 200 channels with all of the popular networks that I like. ESPN and ESPN2 are there for sports, as are TNT and TBS for variety and comedy shows along with a few movies. The main difference when I looked through the Direct TV channel guide was that the Ultimate package included about 12 different movie channels from Encore. Now I can’t say that Encore is anywhere near HBO when it comes to movies, but this option was only an extra five bucks a month. I decided to go ahead with the Ultimate package for the movie networks.
It works out well with the Direct TV DVR that they gave me, which records both high definition and standard content. I can record movies either on the Encore networks, or on TBS or Spike and then when I watch them its easy to just zip through the commercials. It really is worth the small charge each month as cable movie networks always run five minutes of commercials at every break.
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