DirecTV is pretty good. Some issues with Rain/Snow fade (usually only 30 mins of an outage), but that's mostly due to the northern latitude where I live. For snow issues, I recommend people get their dishes mounted lower on their buildings if possible. Then you can go outside with a broom and sweep the dish off. I've done that a few times in snow storms (dish is mounted to the garage next to one of the doors). I would think those living in the southern states would have their dishes pointed more upwards and would probably be less affected by rain fade. DirecTV receivers, at least their SD receivers, suck ass. They are slow, lock up on channels occasionally, and sometimes forget their setup. The caller ID also randomly displays "cannot show caller information" when there are no phones ringing. They have some slightly shady billing practices, like renewing your contract if you get your receivers replaced under warranty or under their "maintenance protection" plan. One would think that if I'm paying a monthly fee to protect the hardware, that if I call to replace a dead or malfunctoning receiver, that they would replace it and not renew the contract.
Other than those issues, the channel selection is great. I was sad to see G4TV get removed from the channel lineup (really only watched Ninja Warrior) but I'll live.