Both systems offer fair service at best.The cable company seems to have a better service in my opinion, barring any catastrophic failure such as last week. I had cable for quite a few years and switched to direct TV. I have had more signal issues in the last three months with the dish than I did with cable for the past 4 years. As far as HD Both dish and cable deliver HD in MPEG2 format which means it is compressed. The only true HD that you can get is from and antenna becasue it is uncompressed.

Another myth is Satellite is an all digital format. This is true if you have a digital TV. If you don't then the signal is converted back into analog so you TV can recieve the signal on channel three. Same is true for Cable the only difference being Cable does deliver some of thier channels in analog format usually channels below 100 are analog.