UPC Horizon Launched

kwat wrote: »

Just got the box today.
Am I right in saying you can only add a maximum of 10 favourite channels?

No, you should be able to add more. I think the max is 100.

An Cigire wrote: »

Considering getting horizon in the €66 deal (think it's 35 at the start) just wondering are the upc contracts 12 months I length?

Plan is get that and at lesst one multi room.

Has any one experience if horizon in the Dublin 11 area?

Yep 12 months.

Don't know what experience specific to Dublin 11 means but it should be fine.

Horizon box sucks, slow and clunky interface which makes channel surfing an absolute chore

Dravokivich wrote: »

Only installed the Horizon box over the weekend and found a couple of design issues:

- visually, browsing with it is an eyesore. All the menu's are really really dark.
- flicking though the channels presents an overlay that covers most of the screen.
- You can't use the left/right direction buttons to just scroll through the channels, or up/down direction buttons to browse program listings, you need to change the channel or use the guide.

The DLNA features are terrible for music. You can only select one song, then need to select another after it's finished? Everything else I have that uses DLNA will just play through the folder contents until told to stop.

Yeah, the DLNA playback is incredibly poorly done - so bad it'd nearly be better if they'd left it out completely. To make matters worse, if you start playing a song, then navigate away the play/pause controls don't work. You have to navigate back to stop the song.

I agree too, the on-screen overlays are far too big, for no real reason. If people are still using very small TVs, then some of the on-screen text must be unreadable.

The EPG is core to the customer experience, have UPC not figured this out??

If the customer becomes frustrated trying to channel surf, you can put the service in the bin!

It seems every new iteration of the UPC EPG is a complete rebuild and not a development building on the previous version.

If you look at sky / freesat, they both started with basic operability and then added feature after feature with subtle changes.

The remote control for instance, has dramatically changed from version to version on UPC, you can still work the first sky box issued with the latest 2TB box remotes...

The freesat humax hdr 1 box could record 4 -5 channels at a time, keeps its stability and could stream recordings to other devices - it never crashed once on me!

MagicMarker wrote: »

Got connected up alright in the end.

One thing though, me and my flatmates have all connected to the wifi on our laptops and now we can see them in the "my devices", and apparently we can access photos/music on the laptops.

Obviously we don't want this, can we remove them?

You shouldn't be able to access anything (even with the device being shown) without each installing the Twonky server, As far as I can tell.

Was thinking about "upgrading" to horizon. Glad I checked out this thread, certainly won't be doing it now

Vudgie wrote: »

I was thinking of changing to Horizon but all of the negative feedback is a definite worry. It is clear that the issues are more than the typical isolated ones which while annyoing for the people involved may not be fully reflective of the general service.

Is there anyone that has found the Horizon experience any good at all?

I spent a long long time reading these boards before taking the plunge before Xmas. I was a little annoyed that no one outlined positive either on these boards. So here goes for my full review.

This review is based on comparisons with Sky HD switch by the way. I also use other FreeSat and Freeview boxes like AzBox HD so I have a good range of experience with satellite receivers etc...

First for the Bad

- Navigation on the channels list is a tad slow. Not bad though.
- Recordings and the management of them is poor. It is quite slow to navigate them up and down and very slow to delete etc... There is no series delete but there no series delete on Sky either. I dont know why this is so hard to do. Saying all this the fundamentals of recording is good. Nothing is missed and you can record a load of stuff. I have not needed to record 4 programmes at once aside from maybe at Xmas or on a Sunday for sports.
- You cannot jump to a certain time in a recording. This is one of the most frustrating BAR NONE. When you leave a film and then want to go back to it you have to fast forward through it all. You also cannot do this for items off your network or DNLA playback
- The WIFI range is not impressive outside the living room. I have compensated for this by using homeplugs and setting up a WIFI extender at the other end of the house and all is good now but for NEWBIES and non techies this should not have to be done.
- You cannot override DNS setting. This is a specialist need for me but very annoying all the same. One thing I really like about the Horizon box is that it has a little more of an OpenSource/Android feel to it so I feel I have more control with it HOWEVER this limitation is annoying

The Good

- The channel listing and ordering is excellent. This may seem a small thing but when I am just dipping into telly for an hour or two a night I like to scroll down the list of channels and see whats on quickly. Sky really annoyed me with the BBCs at 141 and 3E somewhere else etc.. Horizon have it ordered perfectly and the channel up and down can be used to great affect to zap quickly. the category listing could be a little better but is still quite good.
- The HD channels instead of SD channels by default is Brilliant. Simple again but brilliant. With no fuss and no hopping around RTE 1 and 2 and BBC and TG4 are all HD by default. This is very cool in my opinion and gets the best out of my TV. Also RTE have upped there game with HD channels so this is great that Horizon are streaming it by default.
- Picture and sound quality on channels is excellent espeacially HD obviously.
- The RTE player/TV3 player facility is excellent. Again another simple improvement but it works really well. I have now watched a lot of programs I forgot to record on the player. Since the recording is a bit cumbersome it is a great addition. I also used to record the News (sad I know) in case something of big news happened on a day. I don't need to clog up the recordings any more as the player has it now. The quality if the RTE player is excellent too.
- The network playback is very good. I don't use the DNLA server however the horizon box picked up my other router and USB drive off it on my home network and I can play all my movies by browsing the folders on it. I really like this as I had a media player before under my telly which is not needed now.
- The Web App and new Android app are good additions and nice to have. it would be nice to be able to use outside of home like Sky Go but still they are nice and good to have.
- Price and value is excellent - Even though i ended up paying 15 Euro more with decrease after Xmas I still thing Phone/BB(200 MB) and TV (with HD) for 50 quid for 6 months then 80 bucks for another 6 is good.


So in Summary -

Overall I am about at a 65% positive rating on my move to Horizon from Sky. If they could sort out the recording listing slowness and delete logic then this would shoot up to about 85/90% until other negatives are sorted.

Would I switch back to Sky HD. No. The channel listing and the use of HD channels as a way to get money out of you shows that they are not cracked up to be much. If Horizon get their recording management sorted out and zapping speeded up then I think they have them beaten hands down. Right now they are still ahead in my opinion.

Yea thanks for that Bistoman understood about resume. I suppose its more being able to get back if you let it play through by accident etc..

Agreed on fundamentals they need to be sorted. However sometimes what seems simple to sort to an end user e.g. speed of zapping and navigation could involve a whole redesign of the code and build of the box. Lets hope thats not the case but since they haven't fixed them quickly it would point that this may be the case or else they simply are not prioritizing it.

From speaking to one of the install guys they said the takeup was not good. If I were them I would fix these issues first rather than dropping prices. Good reviews and being labelled as a must have device will get them all the customers in the world here.

Vudgie wrote: »

I was thinking of changing to Horizon but all of the negative feedback is a definite worry. It is clear that the issues are more than the typical isolated ones which while annyoing for the people involved may not be fully reflective of the general service.

Is there anyone that has found the Horizon experience any good at all?

I think it's ok, better than the previous Cisco box in my experience.

Nice looking UI, faster than the Cisco box (but still too slow at many things), strong feature set (like the built-in apps, On Demand, multiple-record ability, the video preview in the Guide)

For me, the problem is they tried to do too much right at the start and ended up not doing anything perfectly. There's a DLNA client for playing music/videos off your PC/Mac, but it's really awkward to use. The apps are nice (I love the WikiTrivia app which brings up info on what you're watching) but some are slow, very unstable, or partially implemented (The Score app can't show any embedded content, which means virtually every story!). The convenience of an all-in-one box is great, but people probably don't want antennae hanging off their cable TV box and a Wifi router doesn't work great without them.

They could have made it simpler and quicker to navigate and built up features from there. But it's still a bit of a 'jack of all trades master of none', IMO.