If You’re Not Married, Your DirecTV DVRs Can’t Be, Either

It’s a beautiful thing when two people decide to move in together and combine their lives into a single household. This also means consolidating accounts, which is why Rob and his girlfriend wanted to add her DVR to his DirecTV account, discontinuing her account and forging ahead into the future as one TV-watching entity. Rob tells us that DirecTV informed him that this wasn’t possible, but would be if they were getting married instead of moving in together.

Rob writes:

My girlfriend and I are building a house and have moved in together. An attempt to move her DVR onto my account failed. They would not consolidate our account because we’re not getting married. I specifically asked if that would make the difference and it was confirmed that would make the difference. Why not just cancel her account and add a DVR? Well, besides losing all her saved shows we would face a new equipment lease of $199 and a $40 setup fee. We naturally cancelled her account and are doing without a second DVR despite being willing to pay for the service.

It makes one wonder what complications would arise if we were getting married but were the same gender. Hmmmm.

Indeed, the legal situation where same-sex couples are married in some states, but not married in others or when dealing with the federal government has created consumer affairs problems that we’ve posted about in the past. That may not be whats going on here, though: it could have been one phone agent who was misinformed, or some other miscommunication.

We’re in contact with DirecTV over this situation, so we don’t yet know whether this is an official DirecTV policy or a screwup. The important lesson here is to question policies that seem impractical or unfair. How many other customers have walked away from a company or scaled their service back because of an impractical policy, or a misinterpreted one?

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