A cable/dish/FiOS decision

If you don't know, my wife and I are buying our first home next week. We, and by we I mean she, have been packing for weeks. Everything is in place. The mortgage is ready to rock, the down payment is ready to be spent, settlement is all set up, the title insurance is done, home owners insurance is in place, the inspection and appraisal are taken care of, and the utilities are switched...everything except the cable set up. A crucial decision that I have agonized over for a couple weeks now.

I have three choices in the new home - Comcast cable, Direct TV, and Verizon FiOS. I am a cable guy. I have had cable for all but a year of my life. It is dependable. I know it inside and out. It feels like home. I did have Direct TV for a year in 2007. It was OK. The problem was the threat of losing signal in a storm, even if it was only for a minute or two. And I had bad experiences with their service.

The wild card is FiOS. It is new technology. It promises better and faster and more. I love new toys and I love technology. A rolling stone gathers no moss. But there are always growing pains with new technologies and I have heard that there are glitches in the FiOS matrix.

My needs, er, wants, are : Internet, HD, DVR, HBO, Showtime, in addition to your regular digital cable...and a major bonus would be the YES channel (in HD). I have three TVs, but only one is HD. I want my DVR to be HDMI compatible.

Price wise they are all too expensive. I have Comcast now and when I called a rep to see about new deals were available. Not only were there no deals available, but the gist was the deals I had are over and the only deals available increase the bill by $15 plus dollars.

This was all the opening FiOS needed. I called FiOS and the deals were similar price wise. There are more HD channels. They have HDNet and YES. But you need a box on every TV and there is no OnDemand. The Internet connection should be much faster and a show saved on the DVR can be played on any TV.

So here we go with FiOS.