DirectTV will only upgrade new customers to an HD box. Otherwise you have to pay for it. Unless you have a crafty wife like mine who just called, bitched, dropped their service, then called them back for a new customer hook up w/ the HD box!
I used to work at Directv and I can tell you that what you did is quite common. I worked primarily as a technical support representative but could do practically everything else a customer wanted. In fact, the only thing I couldn't do for a customer was cancel your service.
When I worked there, every agent had a $250 credit limit per customer. CRG, the folks who could cancel your service, had a $500 credit limit per customer.
Think about that for a moment, I was authorized by Directv to give up to $250 in credit, as a discount on their next bill, free equipment or free programming, to every customer I talked to...if I wanted to.
Now if I gave away that amount it would have to be justifiable but the point is that we, as agents, had quite a bit of leeway in offering deals.
I looked at it this way, what impacted the company's bottom line more? Giving away a Tivo which costed, at the time, $99 dollars or losing that customer?
If the customer had even the most basic programming package of total choice it was around $35 a month I think.
$35 a month x 12 months = 420 dollars a year the customer is paying.
Minus the $100 for the Tivo and the customer is still forking over 320 dollars.
So you take the bargin, bottom of the barrel, lowest amount that a customer could pay:
320 dollars a year and multiply it by 12 million customers = $ 3,840,000,000.
That's almost 4 billion dollars in gross revenue, which is why Directv can afford to give it's customers such great deals.
Furthermore, that near $4 billion in revenue doesn't include NFL Sunday Ticket, the college football season plan, NHL, MLB, premium channels like HBO, Showtime, etc and PPV events like UFC, WWE, boxing, football, movies, adult movies, etc that the company also makes money on.
The trick to getting free stuff, read equipment upgrades, is to spend as much money per month on Directv as you can and be with the company for several years...the longer the better.
To illustrate this let me give you a real life example that I experienced:
Customer A called me up and wanted an HD receiver to go with his new HD television. I look over his account and notice that he has Total Choice Plus, 3 existing receivers, he has NFL Sunday ticket, orders the occasional PPV event: UFC, boxing etc and he's been with us for almost 5 years.
Customer B called me and wants a HD receiver to go with his new HD television. I look over his account a see that he's been with us for just over a year, has the most basic programming package and none of the other bells and whistles.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out that Customer A will receive the better deal because he has a higher value to the company than Customer B.
