Cutting the cable/dish/subscription service Direct TV

A while back, I made the decision to stop paying for a subscription to Direct TV. They never came out to remove the dish and they never asked me for the little directv boxes and remotes in my house. I called and inquired about returning them multiple times to no avail.

Now I have at least three maybe four Direct TV sets like this:

https://www.amazon.com/Directv-C61W-Receiver-Required-Separately/dp/B07H9QJMCT

Ebay seems to have several for sale but I have no use for them. Any recommendations on what to do with them? I’ve considered e-wasting them but I’m not sure where to do this.

Anybody else have a similar situation happen to them?

BTW: I am an Amazon Prime guy now and my wife subscribes to Disney + so we haven’t completely escaped the subscription racket.

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@Hanna_Kessler had a group that was willing to do e-waste… Let’s see what she says.

I’m thinking the group that she told us about was kinda next door-ish. Maybe in Coppell?

I used to take e-things to a recycler down off of Old Denton, but that was pre-pandemic.

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Personally, I’d send an email to them and give them 90 days to pick-up or you will considered them abandoned and dispose them. That’s a reasonable amount of time, provides you a written record that you made a good faith effort to pick them.

I’ve got dish on my roof from about 1992, but at that time we may have bought it. I’ve always wondered where the focal is, strip the paint and have chromed and see if I can make a solar “oven” out of it!

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The last time I used DirectTV was 2018. I sent them an email, called them. They even said they’d send a box but never did. They are never going to ask for them back.

Stupid and wasteful AT&T.

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Then I’d say you are done.

I think part of it is the cost of getting them exceeds their value and they are obsolete. I mean sending someone out to take that off the roof if you consider their fully burdened cost for the tech … leave it. Same for the box.

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cover with mylar.
I’d suggest putting the rest of their “equipment” in the oven, and see if you can get some gold out of the melty pile.
My experience is “they”, whichever provider it is, care <0 about the equipment, will never pick it up, and there’s no point asking. Most e-cyclers don’t want it b/c it’s “owned” by a telecom-ish entity & they worry about “stuff”. I suspect most of it is disposed of in dumpsters/landfill for this reason. This is something we as consumers should really kick up more dust on, insisting our providers give us a path to disposal and make good on it. I mean, it’ll cost us more, but good stewardship, etc.

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PS in a pinch, I hear inside-out chip bags’ll work… :man_shrugging:

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I have a dish also. Anyone want to use it for a solar cooker? Want to come over (near Duncanville High School), have a beer, point it at the sun, and see if it gets hot at the focal point?

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If you’re not being billed for them (i.e. your subscription ended in 2018 and they’ve not pestered you since), dispose of them as you see fit. Speaking from experience as an employee of a provider that also runs a cable TV service, there are two factors at play:

  • CPE (Customer Premises Equipment; used to mean telco gear on the provider’s side of the demarc, now it basically means any equipment associated with the service at the customer premises) has a finite economic lifespan; oftentimes on the ~decade scale. At the end of this period its utility to the provider is ranges from marginal (still good enough for revenue service) to negative (it can no longer help generate revenue).
  • The implosion of the pay-TV market has greatly accelerated the lifecycle depreciation of many classes of equipment associated with television. It’s very likely that those STBs are worthless to the provider now: given a declining userbase, declining revenues, and increasing costs as content owners develop their own streaming platforms there’s no demand for them in the existing userbase nor rationale to fold them into another internal development/maintenance cycle.

My own employer only wants about a half dozen of our 50+ deployed models of customer equipment (set tops, modems, routers, other accoutrements) back from customers upon upgrade or termination of service.

Got a collection of similar disused gear myself piling up, including a set top box that’s still on my account but not being billed. Tempted to plug that set top box in in again as it gets cold since the cats enjoy its waste heat.

Yeah there is that label on the things. I do wish there were some way to clearly communicate to e-cyclers that models A, B, C have been obsoleted and they’re free to do with them as they wish. But otherwise processing them is an expense for the company since the margins on e-cycling aren’t so high that the company can negate the processing expense via referral fees.

Otherwise … pull the PCBs for e-waste and scrap the (likely steel) housings separately? Not sure if consumer bins will take steel other than cans but if you reduce it down to mostly the steel housings might get turned into fresh ingots without complaint.

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I used to do e-waste recycling many years ago.

Here lately, I’ve been considering getting back into it on a bit of a smaller scale…

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When I cancelled DirecTV after about 10 years, they sent me a letter telling me I didn’t have to return anything and encouraging me to try to recycle it.

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AT&T customer service is pitiful. I tried to be professional and to let them know to please collect their equipment and they said they’d ship me a box. It never came. I cannot believe the equipment isn’t reusable.

Just trying to dicontinue the service was a challenge. I got a lot of pushback from them.

My two bits is that Direct TV and AT&T are not a service oriented company and doing business with them was a bad experience all the way around.

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