PORT ISABEL – A Winter Texan says an upgrade to his satellite TV system has only made issues he's experiencing worse.

Larry Filippine is enjoying his retirement with his wife, Patricia, at their home in Port Isabel.  He says he and his wife have one thing they love to spend their time doing.

"We are definitely movie lovers. We're retired, we enjoy watching movies," he says.

Recently, Filippine has had some interruption of his favorite activity. He says since his satellite TV provider approved a free upgrade to his receiver in September, he’s had problems.

"It starts with the screen watching a movie. It’ll basically freeze. It could freeze for a couple of seconds. It can freeze for more than a couple seconds,” he explains. “Sometimes it will freeze almost permanently where you have to turn the television off and take the television and turn it back on again."

Filippine says he and his wife have called their provider on average twice a month to ask for a repairman to fix it free of charge. He says he heard a similar response every time out.

"The type of response was, 'We would like you to troubleshoot for us. Would you kindly pull the plug out on all of that? Wait a few minutes, put it back in again. Turn the power back on again, turn everything on. See if it works.' And, it didn't work. It'd just continually freeze," he says.

Filippine says he just wants someone from his satellite TV provider to come out free of charge and fix his TV. 

CHANNEL FIVE NEWS reached out to his satellite TV provider, DirecTV.

A spokesperson for the company, who told us he goes by "Jim", agreed to speak with us over the phone.

"We also received a couple of calls from other customers that are having this issue. The best thing I can do here is to say I am going to issue an escalation ticket to our engineering team," says Jim. "Our engineering team, they'll provide a software update for this receiver box they have."

We also spoke to Jim's supervisor, "Rick", over the phone. We worked to convince Rick to have someone with his company visit the home and look at the receiver and actual satellite dish free of charge to see if a repair can be made.

"I can give you a technician on Thursday," he says.

Rick says the Filippine family will not be charged for their appointment on Thursday morning.

The Filippine’s say they are happy we were able to finally get a technician out to their place.

You can count on CHANNEL 5 NEWS to follow up on this story to see what the worker was able to accomplish.