I've had them both.
I had very poor service with Dish Network -- as in they
refused to send us the box for the third TV even though it was in the package we signed up for, their first tech installed the dish on our fence and not on our house
while we were not home, they charged us to have a second tech come out and move it off the fence and on the house, and when we expressed our displeasure, were told flat out we signed a contract (kind of a hard thing to do on the phone, actually, but whatever) and that they would bill us for a year anyway if we cancelled.
We kept it for our requisite year. We called DirectTV.
Their tech took one look at the old dish, and immediately asked us why the Dish people drilled a hole through our wall to run their wire, when they could have hooked it up to our cable box ? . . . He asked if our signal was always weak on our second TV (which it was, and which both the cable company and Dish offerred to fix for us by rewiring our house at the cost of a couple hundred dollars, to which we replied, we'll live with the weak signal) . . . and found the problem was a splitter in the attic that was on backwards
. . . he gave us the third box we were promised without our prompting . . .
And now, after a couple - several years, my wife saw DirectTV advertising some new features with a remote that looked nothing like ours. She figured she would call. They pulled up our account, thanked my wife for being a DirectTV customer for X years, and how could she help? Well, we saw this advertisement . . . Next day,
next day, a tech showed up with new boxes and new remotes, set them all up, no charge, and thank you ma'am.
Might not be that big a difference in the programming or costs, but in my case,
service makes all the difference.
YMMV.
