TV Options Marin County (San Francisco, Tiburon: 2009, credit, house)

[Hobart]

I will be moving from Asia to Tiburon soon, after living abroad for almost 15 years, I miss American TV. I can only get some things over here. Can someone let me know what sort of options I will have in Marin County? I suppose there will be one or two Cable TV companies, and a couple of Sat TV competitors as well as over the air HD TV? Anyway, I really would appreciate the run down. I can then peruse their websites and see the channel listings and dream about things like TIVO and HDTV that I have only read about.

[sonarrat]

Marin County has an exclusive agreement with Comcast for cable, as they do with most of the Bay Area. As far as satellite, as long as you have a clear view of the night sky you should be able to get either Dish or DirecTV with no problems. Cable usually has a better signal quality.

[Tallysmom]

Originally Posted by sonarrat

Marin County has an exclusive agreement with Comcast for cable, as they do with most of the Bay Area. As far as satellite, as long as you have a clear view of the night sky you should be able to get either Dish or DirecTV with no problems. Cable usually has a better signal quality.

We have Dishnet and we are very very happy with it. As we haven't had cable in 12 years I can't comment on the signal quality, but I can say, in the 12 years we've had Dish I haven't had a service person have to come to my house to fix it. The very few problems we have had -- and I do mean very few -- like none in the past six years -- were fixed by a phone call to tech support where you get connected to a PERSON. A few simple machine tweaks (as simple as pulling out the "smart card" and waiting a minute to put it back in) and it's back.

I have the "everything 260 package" (they keep changing the names) which does NOT have any premium channels, two recievers and local channels for 64.99 a month.

We would never ever go back to cable. Our experience with them was HORRIBLE -- beyond belief. I do have to say though -- it wasn't exactly their fault. We had a rogue cable installer guy who kept knocking out our cable as he climbed the pole to steal his cable. But this went on for months -- at one time they couldn't send anyone out to fix it for DAYS and all we got was a small credit.... they never fixed the problem of finding a way to secure the cable boxes.

[humboldtrat]

You can probably get decent over the air reception if you have an unobstructed, line of sight view south towards San Francisco where the TV transmitters are (Mt. Sutro). You would probably get 8 or so channels. I don't have cable because it's not worth the $50/month or whatever to get 150 channels of cr*p. You would need a converter box or a digital TV in 2009 to get reception.

[whitechocolate86]

Does the bay area have phone company based cable tv...such as AT&Ts uverse of verizon's fios network?

[sonarrat]

UVerse is fiber optics actually, not cable. I know that it's not available where I am, and neither is FiOS.