I have had DirectTV for 10 years and I lose my signal maybe twice a year due to storms, maybe 15 or 20 min at a time. This year is the first time I have ever had enough snow on my dish where I actually lost my signal and had to clean it off, the cool thing was that the show I missed due to having no signal was automatically added to the DVR again so instead of the show being recorded at 10:00pm it was recorded at 4:30am. As far as picture quality, there is no contest, DirectTV is better than cable. Does cable even offer 1080p yet?