I am asking about prices, and service, as well as outages and such.

Either system beats cable by along shot.
Dish will give you afew more channels then Direct, at a few dollars less. DTV has the sunday ticket.
if you want HD, then it is dish.

Recently I have been checking that out myself. I have a few friends with dishes that say they can be an issue depending on the weather and such. A few people really were complaining. I did some checking, and depending on the channels you want it can be a better deal, but if you tend to want many of the channels you get on cable..then you may have to get more than one package resulting in a higher bill. I figured it would cost me about the same to get a a few less channels, so I decided to go with the cable. I need Cartoon Channels for my son, and family channels as well as basic movie channels such as TNT AMC and that meant I needed at least 2 packages. If I wanted all the same channels it would have cost me more per month. Then there is equipment rental and once you pay it off you own it and have to fix it if it breaks. It seems like it is not as great as the commercials say. I hope this helps you.

we have the dish.its pretty good wit the dvr and such. the price must be atleast decent because my parents still payin for it and their cheap!hope i helped!:-]

It depends on what you're looking for. If you really, REALLY want the NFL Sunday Ticket and nothing else matter to you, then get DIrecTV. Otherwise, Dish Network tends to be the better value. They also have the most HD channels of any provider, including cable. I just made the switch to dish network from cable a year ago and have been really happy with it. The technology is a lot better than it used to be, and almost any type of signal issue can easily be corrected if you start having problems. We've only experienced an outage once in the entire year we've had it, but it came back on within a minute.