HR 34 act question
1 - 15 of 15 Posts
Joined
·
3,585 Posts
I thought someone said they didn't think the HR34 was going to be able to be purchased at all?
Anyway as the others were saying, if you are paying $400 or less then it is going to be a leased unit. Activating a leased unit on an account automatically starts a new agreement. I believe it's 18 months for an SD receiver, or 24 months for pretty much anything else (SD-DVR, HD Receiver, HD-DVR, HMC).
Anyway as the others were saying, if you are paying $400 or less then it is going to be a leased unit. Activating a leased unit on an account automatically starts a new agreement. I believe it's 18 months for an SD receiver, or 24 months for pretty much anything else (SD-DVR, HD Receiver, HD-DVR, HMC).
You can get an owned HR34 for $450? That's pretty amazing.Jerry_K said:
Incidentally, isn't the ETF $20 per month remaining? That would mean that paying $150 more would be superior if you canceled in the first 17 months and inferior if you canceled in the last 7 months.
While I'm sure some people would want to buy that insurance, it's a rather expensive "policy" so to speak.
Joined
·
4,146 Posts
What I find puzzling is why anyone would be so specific about truly "owning" otherwise entirely useless proprietary equipment and at the very same time so irked that there might be a contract involved for getting service from the only source that can sell service to them. That's a mind-boggling concept; a real head-shaker.
Why would anyone pay even the leased price for a DVR that they might want to stop using in less than 2 years, let alone the full non-subsidized price? That false sense of freedom one might get from owning otherwise useless hardware is just that; a false sense of freedom. True owners have to be deluded enough to be OK with living that lie, because that is the only "advantage" owning has.
Look at cell phones. In one common, even ubiquitous example, Apple will subsidize $550 of the $750 list price for a iPhone 4S as long as you agree to be enslaved to a $80-100 monthly 24-month contract with the carrier (who then pays Apple back something on the order of a reported $18 a month to cover that). No one complains. Especially not Apple with their $20 Billion-with-a-B mound of cash, or the carrier who sits on a similar pile of less-deserved booty.
Does that $18 a month come out of the pile of cash the carrier has? Perhaps, but that particular pile of cash comes from the subscribers who pay over-inflated charges. One way or the other, the sub pays for the full cost of designing and manufacturing that phone, just like one way or another, the DBS subs end up paying for the subsidized lease price and eventually the true unsubsidized cost of every single DVR. And dish, and switch, and cables, and installation.
The full hardware and service cost always passes to the user. Leasing a DVR and agreeing to a contract to overpay for content is just one more way to ensure that DTV gets theirs, the other method being to pay the unsubsidized price outright, whereupon the customer still overpays for the privilege to use it. Users don't "own" the content either; the cold proof of that is if you record content and then disconnect service, whereupon the carrier revokes your license to view that content by making it impossible to play it back after a few days.
Submit to their terms, or hit the road, are the two available choices. And that's just the way it is.
Why would anyone pay even the leased price for a DVR that they might want to stop using in less than 2 years, let alone the full non-subsidized price? That false sense of freedom one might get from owning otherwise useless hardware is just that; a false sense of freedom. True owners have to be deluded enough to be OK with living that lie, because that is the only "advantage" owning has.
Look at cell phones. In one common, even ubiquitous example, Apple will subsidize $550 of the $750 list price for a iPhone 4S as long as you agree to be enslaved to a $80-100 monthly 24-month contract with the carrier (who then pays Apple back something on the order of a reported $18 a month to cover that). No one complains. Especially not Apple with their $20 Billion-with-a-B mound of cash, or the carrier who sits on a similar pile of less-deserved booty.
Does that $18 a month come out of the pile of cash the carrier has? Perhaps, but that particular pile of cash comes from the subscribers who pay over-inflated charges. One way or the other, the sub pays for the full cost of designing and manufacturing that phone, just like one way or another, the DBS subs end up paying for the subsidized lease price and eventually the true unsubsidized cost of every single DVR. And dish, and switch, and cables, and installation.
The full hardware and service cost always passes to the user. Leasing a DVR and agreeing to a contract to overpay for content is just one more way to ensure that DTV gets theirs, the other method being to pay the unsubsidized price outright, whereupon the customer still overpays for the privilege to use it. Users don't "own" the content either; the cold proof of that is if you record content and then disconnect service, whereupon the carrier revokes your license to view that content by making it impossible to play it back after a few days.
Submit to their terms, or hit the road, are the two available choices. And that's just the way it is.
Joined
·
36,659 Posts
I got mine because I couldn't stand getting replacements from D* that didn't work. All mine (I think) came from multiple dwelling users and all had just one owner (the Access Card Dept. can tell you how many times an HR has been activated) and all except one were in perfect shape and are still running.dpeters11 said:
Naturally, as soon as I finished buying them, the HRs became very much more stable and I haven't had to use one of my owned HRs as a replacement....:nono2:
Rich
1 - 15 of 15 Posts
