UPC Digital+ recording Sky movies during the day

Rulmeq

Hi,
I'm posting in utter disbelief that I'm the only person to have UPC's Digital+ service with the Sky movies package (€30 extra per month btw), who has tried to record a movie during the day time (5am to 8pm) where they claim they are mandated to have the channel pin locked in case some sub-18 y/o manages to gain access to my STB.

I've had the box replaced, and I've had customer service representatives all tell me "That should work", and then after the "Idiot's guide walk through" they all have the same revelation, "Oh, you need to be there to enter the pin" -- Seriously!?!? If I'm there to enter the pin, then I wouldn't be recording it, I'd just watch it!

I've searched the web, and nobody else seems to be having this problem, but the fact that even with a replacement STB, I still can't set the box to record from sky premier during the day means that this must be the case.

Also, I've had sky+ HD for the last year, and I can't believe the retrograde step I took in moving to NTL (I can't mount a dish on the building, because I don't own it, and the management company have rules about them :mad: )

Just to back up the above paragraph, because I'm sure there will be people coming on claiming that this is the best service in the world, this is what I've experienced:

* Dual recording needs the box to be in standby, so if you need to record two programmes at the same time, you can't have the box powered on. This means you can't watch anything that you have already recorded during this time, you can't check to see if the programmes are actually being recorded (all of these were standard features of the SKY+ box)

* When you do select two programmes to record at the same time, you get a conflict message saying neither programme will be recorded - which leads to the next point

* Sometimes dual recording will work (while on standby), but sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it will record 1 programme, sometimes none. It's all a bit random.

* Series link only works on some channels - utterly pointless

* When series link works on a channel, it sometimes just skips a day, so it will record Monday, Tuesday, skip Wednesday, start again Thursday!

* When everything appears to work, so we get the perfect storm, series link work, dual recording works, it will just record half the programme! No conflicts, no warnings, just 15minutes of a 30 minute programme.

* Even after you have entered this utterly pointless pin to watch a 12A/PG movie on Sky premier during the day, it will sometimes just hang, sometimes it will tell you to enter your pin. -- I can see why Sky might like to have this functionality enabled for their rivals, but I don't see why UPC are putting up with it. They already have a parental control system built into their boxes, they shouldn't be forcing another one, that can't be over-ridden onto their customers.

Sorry for the rant, but all of this just worked with the sky box, and while I had a few annoyances, such as the remote only working from particular angles, I'd go back to it in a heart beat.

I guess I'll have to live with the above issues, but there is no way I can be the only person who has a Digital+ box with the movie channels who wanted to record a movie that was on during the day? Can I ?

dangerousdavid

I didnt know series link was now live???

Rulmeq

dangerousdavid wrote: »

I didnt know series link was now live???

:rolleyes:

Yeah, I guess I'd better lower my expectations. This is the problem of getting a good service, it's so painful when you lose it, and people who haven't been on the better service will berate you for expecting such things.

seamus

I'm not necessarily going to defend it here, just give a few points:

Rulmeq wrote: »

* Dual recording needs the box to be in standby, so if you need to record two programmes at the same time, you can't have the box powered on. This means you can't watch anything that you have already recorded during this time, you can't check to see if the programmes are actually being recorded (all of these were standard features of the SKY+ box)

* When you do select two programmes to record at the same time, you get a conflict message saying neither programme will be recorded - which leads to the next point

* Sometimes dual recording will work (while on standby), but sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it will record 1 programme, sometimes none. It's all a bit random.

SKy+ has been around longer. A *lot* longer. Yes, you would think that they would model their service on Sky+, but UPC are a much a smaller company, and as one would expect have a much smaller team working on programming the boxes to work the way they should. Therefore features need to be written and rolled out in order of priority. The software running Sky's boxes would be owned by Sky so UPC have to look at the Sky box and try to replicate the functionality on different hardware (both in the box and the network). So having a Sky+ clone right off the bat wouldn't have been possible. It's been on the Irish market for nearly two years at this point and from what I can see (got the box last week), they're getting closer to competing with Sky+.
Sky, by comparison, have a six-year headstart on UPC which is why their feature set is better and their service smoother.

AFAIK, the above issues you mention are all things which are being worked on.

* Series link only works on some channels - utterly pointless

I wouldn't say entirely pointless. The problem is getting the information from the channels themselves. For example, TV3 needs to tell UPC (electronically obviously) that The Wire is broadcast every Monday night, but the episodes shown on Thursday night and Sunday morning are re-runs and so only the Monday episodes should be included in the series link.

Getting this information to UPC wouldn't be high on the network's agendas and UPC hasn't the same muscle as Sky in twisting their arms.

I guess I'll have to live with the above issues, but there is no way I can be the only person who has a Digital+ box with the movie channels who wanted to record a movie that was on during the day? Can I ?

The only thing I'd question is that the movie channels no doubt show the same films over and over for a week or so. I'd say it would be rare enough that someone would bother to record a movie so they could watch it at 8pm (for example), when the station will show it at 9pm anyway.

kmick

seamus wrote: »

So having a Sky+ clone right off the bat wouldn't have been possible. It's been on the Irish market for nearly two years at this point and from what I can see (got the box last week), they're getting closer to competing with Sky+.

From that list of problems (which essentially renders the + features useless) Id say they have a long way to go to be closer to SKY. In this day and age you just cant release a product that does not work and expect people to wait for the software upgrade. I mean the technology for recording has been around a long time so there are no excuses for having that poor a product. Saying that Id still like their 20mb broadband.

Rulmeq

seamus wrote: »

I'm not necessarily going to defend it here, just give a few points:
SKy+ has been around longer. A *lot* longer.

More the reason why UPC should know what people would expect from an equivalent service

seamus wrote: »

Yes, you would think that they would model their service on Sky+, but UPC are a much a smaller company

Even if it was true, it's not an excuse, they are taking my money the same as if they were a larger company.

But UPC are a massive multi-national company with practical monopoly status in cable provision in countries across Europe, a position they achieved by buying up the incumbent cable companies.

seamus wrote: »

and as one would expect have a much smaller team working on programming the boxes to work the way they should.

Again, my comments about the size of the company aside, there are options for them to purchase and use existing technology, it's not like this hasn't been done by say the box that can't be named on these boards. The software on it is open source, so again no excuses. This is all down to UPC deciding to save themselves money by using sub-standard boxes (and not passing on that saving to their end users).

If their service was somehow cheaper as a result, I wouldn't have a right to complain, but their prices are well up there with Sky.

seamus wrote: »

Therefore features need to be written and rolled out in order of priority. The software running Sky's boxes would be owned by Sky so UPC have to look at the Sky box and try to replicate the functionality on different hardware (both in the box and the network). So having a Sky+ clone right off the bat wouldn't have been possible.

This is 2009, not 1999. They have had lots of time to get this right, and they are advertising their service as an alternative to SKY. If you are claiming to be an alternative, then you should be able to provide an equivalent service, or better. Particularly since they have had all these years to let technology catch up and over take Sky.

seamus wrote: »

It's been on the Irish market for nearly two years at this point and from what I can see (got the box last week), they're getting closer to competing with Sky+.

It's not like they have suspended charging me, I'm paying for it now, not in 12 months time.

seamus wrote: »

Sky, by comparison, have a six-year headstart on UPC which is why their feature set is better and their service smoother.

I thought you said you weren't defending them?

seamus wrote: »

AFAIK, the above issues you mention are all things which are being worked on.

Again, they are still charging me for the service today.

seamus wrote: »

I wouldn't say entirely pointless. The problem is getting the information from the channels themselves. For example, TV3 needs to tell UPC (electronically obviously) that The Wire is broadcast every Monday night, but the episodes shown on Thursday night and Sunday morning are re-runs and so only the Monday episodes should be included in the series link.

Getting this information to UPC wouldn't be high on the network's agendas and UPC hasn't the same muscle as Sky in twisting their arms.
The only thing I'd question is that the movie channels no doubt show the same films over and over for a week or so. I'd say it would be rare enough that someone would bother to record a movie so they could watch it at 8pm (for example), when the station will show it at 9pm anyway.

UPC are just as big, if not bigger than sky. If they aren't able to provide the service, they shouldn't be advertising themselves as an alternative.

Rulmeq

kmick wrote: »

Saying that Id still like their 20mb broadband.

No, you probably wouldn't. While this is a rant for another day, I got their 10Mbit/s service, and from about 4pm until midnight it drops to about 2/3Mbit/s down.

Of course NTL claim that all of the services that you use to test the bandwidth of the connection "are unreliable"

I didn't want to get into that one, because I can understand how that can happen, and 2/3Mbit/sec is still and adequate service (yeah, see, I'm in settle mode already)

seamus

Rulmeq wrote: »

More the reason why UPC should know what people would expect from an equivalent service

Even if it was true, it's not an excuse, they are taking my money the same as if they were a larger company.

But UPC are a massive multi-national company with practical monopoly status in cable provision in countries across Europe, a position they achieved by buying up the incumbent cable companies.

However, UPC has about 6.6 million subscribers across Europe. Sky by comparison has 9 million subscribers in the UK & Ireland alone. I couldn't find figures for Sky's European subscribers.

If you take just english-speaking subscriptions, Sky's subscription base of 9 million is 5 times larger than UPC's Irish base of 1.8 million.

5 times the subscribers == massive amounts more profit == more resources to throw at service development.

Again, my comments about the size of the company aside, there are options for them to purchase and use existing technology, it's not like this hasn't been done by say the box that can't be named on these boards. The software on it is open source, so again no excuses. This is all down to UPC deciding to save themselves money by using sub-standard boxes (and not passing on that saving to their end users).

I can't comment on the quality of the boxes. As I understand it, the software on the box is based on OpenTV, but obviously UPC have decided to customise it for their own use. This is understandable - they don't want people to be able to make their own adjustments to the box and branding of course has to come into play.

This is 2009, not 1999. They have had lots of time to get this right, and they are advertising their service as an alternative to SKY. If you are claiming to be an alternative, then you should be able to provide an equivalent service, or better. Particularly since they have had all these years to let technology catch up and over take Sky.

Not entirely though. UPC only took over in 2005. NTL had pretty much sweated the assets badly - upgrades were slow and digita & broadband rollout was poor at the time.

So you have to consider those issues: UPC when they arrived had a patchy network with some areas upgraded and some areas in bad shape, they had a bog-standard digital service where available, the worst customer service line in the country and a limited number of possible subscribers*. I can understand why DVR services weren't top of their agenda.

I thought you said you weren't defending them?

I'm not. It's been 2 years. They could easily have pursued a much more aggressive schedule for developing the boxes and spent more time simply rebranding existing DVR softwares than trying to create their own implementations. But I still wouldn't expect it to be up to Sky+ standard at this point.

*Sky by comparison don't have the same infrastructure problems and can reach any subscriber in Ireland at little or no cost to themselves

Rulmeq

seamus wrote: »

However, UPC has about 6.6 million subscribers across Europe. Sky by comparison has 9 million subscribers in the UK & Ireland alone. I couldn't find figures for Sky's European subscribers.

If you take just english-speaking subscriptions, Sky's subscription base of 9 million is 5 times larger than UPC's Irish base of 1.8 million.

5 times the subscribers == massive amounts more profit == more resources to throw at service development.

I can't comment on the quality of the boxes. As I understand it, the software on the box is based on OpenTV, but obviously UPC have decided to customise it for their own use. This is understandable - they don't want people to be able to make their own adjustments to the box and branding of course has to come into play.
Not entirely though. UPC only took over in 2005. NTL had pretty much sweated the assets badly - upgrades were slow and digita & broadband rollout was poor at the time.

So you have to consider those issues: UPC when they arrived had a patchy network with some areas upgraded and some areas in bad shape, they had a bog-standard digital service where available, the worst customer service line in the country and a limited number of possible subscribers*. I can understand why DVR services weren't top of their agenda.
I'm not. It's been 2 years. They could easily have pursued a much more aggressive schedule for developing the boxes and spent more time simply rebranding existing DVR softwares than trying to create their own implementations. But I still wouldn't expect it to be up to Sky+ standard at this point.

*Sky by comparison don't have the same infrastructure problems and can reach any subscriber in Ireland at little or no cost to themselves

UPC had revenue of $6.5Billion in 2006, this isn't a small family business, I really don't see why you are going out of your way to defend them. I made it clear that I was only venting, if you work for them, or you are somehow personally involved I'm sorry I've insulted you, but none of the excuses that you've posted stand up to the following facts:

They are charging me the full price, they are claiming they are an alternative to Sky, they are making billions.

Edit: I don't really want to go down this route of argument/counter argument. The real reason I posted is to find out if there is another customer out there who has Digital+ with the sky movie package, who wants to record movies during the day?

Cupart

seamus wrote: »

I couldn't find figures for Sky's European subscribers.

That's beacuse Sky doesn't offer subscriptions out side of the British Isles due to copyright reasons

Cupart

seamus wrote: »

But I still wouldn't expect it to be up to Sky+ standard at this point.

Why is that?

It's not only Sky who has integrated Receivers/DVR's in the whole wide world. To my knowledge boxes and the software on these are produced by third parties developers and where there is a will there is a way.

For instance, DVR's didn't hit the Scandinavian Sat market before a couple of years ago and these are just as good as Sky's SKY+ system. Ten years of DVR development should actually be reflected in the new UPC DVR's but they are not. Virgin Media's DVR's in the UK are to my best knowledge fantastic and they haven't been out for that long. TivO in the US have been around for ages as well. The list could go on and on...

Oh, Thomson have produced both SKY+ boxes as well as UPC's Digital+ boxes.

No, miss management is the main problem here. If only NTL had done their home work on before hand there wouldn't have been any discussions on the subject, and we all would be happy as Larry

watty

Cupart wrote: »

That's beacuse Sky doesn't offer subscriptions out side of the British Isles due to copyright reasons

Misleading.

Sky/Murdoch has operations in Mexico, Italy, USA, Germany and also at least NZ or Oz.

UPC is part of Liberty Global. About 20x bigger than eircom. They also have major investment in Slingbox and SiriusXM.

No arguing or abuse. Or Infractions/Banning. Pointless argument. Both are very large companies, but UPC has to cope with integration of NTL/Chorus legacy systems. NTL Ireland doesn't exist anymore.

BuffyBot

Sky/Murdoch has operations in Mexico, Italy, USA, Germany and also at least NZ or Oz.

Which share a lot of technology

watty

Sky Italia boxes are identical.

Freddie59

I've got Digital+. Just set the movie to record as normal, then enter the pin when prompted on the playback. Simple.:)

Rulmeq

Freddie59 wrote: »

I've got Digital+. Just set the movie to record as normal, then enter the pin when prompted on the playback. Simple.:)

Nope on mine it doesn't record, that's why I got the box replaced, and it still doesn't work.

But if that feature works for you, it must be something specific to my area, but that's good news, it means they can fix it.

Thanks for your reply, at least there is hope

Freddie59

Rulmeq wrote: »

Nope on mine it doesn't record, that's why I got the box replaced, and it still doesn't work.

But if that feature works for you, it must be something specific to my area, but that's good news, it means they can fix it.

Thanks for your reply, at least there is hope

Checked with my brother-in-law (Waterford) and another in Dublin. Both working fine. Hope you get sorted.:)

Rulmeq

Freddie59 wrote: »

Checked with my brother-in-law (Waterford) and another in Dublin. Both working fine. Hope you get sorted.:)

They replaced the box yesterday with an older style box (it's about twice the size of the one I had - apparently the ones I had were their newest boxes).

So, I set it to record all the films that were on sky premier yesterday during the day and it worked (as you described, it asks for the pin when you go to play it), and the dual recording seems to be a lot more stable on this new box. Perhaps I'll be able to live with this service now.

While I can now record movies from the channels I'm paying extra from, it still doesn't take from the fact that NTLs service has a long way to come, not just to match Sky+ but to catch up with the dr*amboxes/tivos of this world.

Freddie59

Rulmeq wrote: »

They replaced the box yesterday with an older style box (it's about twice the size of the one I had - apparently the ones I had were their newest boxes).

So, I set it to record all the films that were on sky premier yesterday during the day and it worked (as you described, it asks for the pin when you go to play it), and the dual recording seems to be a lot more stable on this new box. Perhaps I'll be able to live with this service now.

While I can now record movies from the channels I'm paying extra from, it still doesn't take from the fact that NTLs service has a long way to come, not just to match Sky+ but to catch up with the dr*amboxes/tivos of this world.

Well, I suppose it is what it is. Glad you got fixed up. Is it a silver one (that's the one I have)? For me it's perfect. Series link, manageable EPG, freeze live TV.:)

Rulmeq

Freddie59 wrote: »

Well, I suppose it is what it is. Glad you got fixed up. Is it a silver one (that's the one I have)? For me it's perfect. Series link, manageable EPG, freeze live TV.:)

Yes, it's a silver one, the second last one on this page ( http://service.upc.ie/service/?cid=124&aid=94 ). The small black one that I had isn't even listed on that page

I'm happy enough now that I can record movies during the day :rolleyes: I was just pretty much venting. Like I said, if I'd never experienced the service that sky have I probably wouldn't have been as annoyed (The Sky service is actually quite lame when compared with the Sony DVR, and has it's own list of issues - mainly around fast forward/rewind, so in no way am I saying Sky is what the rest should be aiming for).

Anyway, thanks for listening