I think I bought my first DirecTV service in January, 1995, in Midland, MI, because I was fed up with the lousy cable TV service in my neighborhood at the time. I remember placing the dish on the chimney on the roof, with snow still up there, and using a compass for the direction and eye-estimating the elevation angle. I went down to the basement TV to check the signal, and I made a freakishly lucky guess - I had the signal! At the time, DTV gave me exactly what I wanted and at a good price.
It has been a long love / hate relationship, but today we will no longer have DTV service, and I am disconnecting all the hardware to send back to the company at the nearest UPS shop. I no longer watch the news channels I used to watch, since the news has been replaced by mass mental manipulation programs - TV journalism is not just biased, it is deceased. Plus, the handful of channels that I actually watch are all on separate packages, so I have to pay for 500 channels to watch 8. I know, this is intentional, and cable companies do it, too. I no longer watch much sports, as they have been politicized almost as much as the news. The movie channels are not in 4K (except a few channels, and you need special gear and extra charges to watch them).
Time to move on. Over and out, DirecTV.