Dish Network ViP722

Pros: Access to DVR content from two rooms/TV's

Cons: User interface, Programming Guide and Remote are all vastly inferior to Tivo.

Summary: Dish Network does NOT know their own product. In the course of switching to this unit from a Direct Tv/Tivo I had seven people at the company, including three installers, tell me point blank that the unit would not allow pausing live TV on the two tuners and switching between them. Some of them said they'd never heard of such a thing. Some of them said that it would not do that if you chose to make the DVR accessible to a second television.

All of them were wrong and the only way I determined this was by reading CNET's review before going to the Dish website.

As for user experience, it's mixed:

Cons:

-Image quality. The Direct TV signal provided marginally better quality for non-HD viewing than Dish does. Didn't have HD with Direct so I can't compare that.

-User interface. I've used Tivo for a few years now and thought it was brilliant from the first hour. What a shame Dish couldn't have incorporated some of those principles in to their software.

-Remote. Ditto. A blizzard of buttons spread out in ways that put the controls for associated functions in awkward places and the way those buttons control those functions is frequently badly thought-out.

Pros:

-Two rooms can access the same content.

-As Tivo no longer supports two satellite inputs and so will not time-shift two tuners it's only suitable for cable subscribers, so it's no longer a solution for Sat. customers, so our only choice is between Dish and Direct TV. And from what I've heard Direct's UI, remote and DVR are even worse.