We Miss Our TiVo

Having had UPC‘s digital cable TV up and running for a few days now, I feel able to make a few comments about it.

Plus points:

• Cheap: the first six months of basic digital service are free. After that, the basic digital package costs only €2.16 more per month than the basic analogue service, but has a few interesting channels, such as the Travel Channel, that are missing from the analogue package.

• Interesting extra channel pack: BBC3 and BBC4, BBC Prime, Disovery Travel & Living, Discovery Civilisation, Discovery Science, obscurities like /Geschiedenis and Holland Doc, plus a large number of news stations, ranging from the loathesome Fox News to the unintelligible but intriguing Al Jazeera. This package gives one approximately 40 further channels for just €2 extra per month.

• Canal+ free for first month: Canal+ Red, Blue and Yellow are all free for the first month. That’d be a handy way to quickly record some porn if I had a VCR or a DVR connected.

• The decoder is supplied free of charge, but remains the property of UPC.

Minus points:

• The EPG (Electronic Program Guide) is inflexible and lacking power. One can search only 8 days ahead in the programming, but more importantly, it’s impossible to pull up the guide for just the channel that one is watching. Instead, you have to choose either all channels or choose by programme genre. If one chooses the latter, only the channels currently showing a programme from that genre will be listed. Regardless of which option one chooses, the list of channels will be shown, together with the programme each is currently broadcasting. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to page through chronologically to see what will be on each channel an hour or a day from now. Instead, one must select a channel and then page through only that channel’s programmes. Paging from day to day is not seamless, either. One must press a coloured button to move from day to day. This should obviously offer contiguous paging.

• Poor user interface: this complaint is really an extension of the last one. There are many problems with the software’s operating in an illogical or inconvenient way. For example, if one pages through a given channel’s programming to a programme that will be broadcast three days from now and then hits OK on the remote control, the decoder will immediately switch to that channel. It would be more logical for OK to do nothing here or to act as the info key and display information about that programme.

• Poor picture quality: some channels are encoded at an embarrassingly low bit-rate. It’s like watching an Internet video fragment encoded for analogue modem users. Blocking and mosquito noise are abundant.

• No way to automatically change channel or issue a reminder at a pre-set time. It would be nice if the decoder could remind one when an interesting programme is about to start on another channel.

• Single tuner: one cannot send a different channel to the DVR, VCR or whatever than the one being watched. Similarly, since one has only one decoder, any other televisions elsewhere in the house will still have only the analogue signal.

• Bugs: sometimes the channel guide is empty. Sometimes after performing several disparate operations in a row, the picture drops out, necessitating the pulling of the plug. This happened to me multiple times on the first day of use. In fact, as I write this, I see that the image has frozen without my doing anything. Sure enough, pulling the plug does the trick again.

• No way to remove channels that one does not pay for and receive from the EPG.

• The teletext button on the remote doesn’t call up teletext via the decoder; it works only if one first changes the mode of the remote from the decoder to the television. Of course, that causes the TV to change video input from the decoder back to the analogue signal. In short, to view the teletext of a digital-only channel, one must use the teletext button of the TV’s remote control, not that of the decoder.

• Sticking with teletext, the service regularly drops out on various channels. AT5, for example, has had no teletext since I rigged up the decoder. If I want to view it, I have to switch to viewing the channel via the analogue signal.

• No ability to compile a list of favourite channels or reorder the channels. One must remember each three digit channel number and the channels are not consecutively numbered.

In conclusion, UPC’s digital TV product falls quite a way short of, say, DirecTV and drastically short of a DirecTiVo. That device is a DVR as well as a decoder, so a direct comparison is somewhat unfair, but at the end of the day, I do want those extra features: the dual tuner, the built-in DVR, the ability to search the programme guide and record programmes based on content (keywords, actors’ names, etc.) rather than time of day, the intelligence to record programmes I haven’t asked for, based on past viewing habits, etc.

TiVo has spoilt me. I didn’t even watch American television apart from the Tour de France and a few things on HBO until we got our TiVo. That box of tricks managed to sift a couple of nuggets a week from thousands of hours of mindless dross, often finding them on channels whose existence I was scarcely aware of.

Whilst the selection of channels offered by UPC is vastly better than what is available in the US (which is actually more my European bias coming into play than an objective judgement), there is no way to find the stuff worth watching without manually reading through the EPG, something UPC has made painfully awkward to do.

Still, as an improvement over UPC’s analogue offering, it’s great. It’s barely any more expensive, provides generally better picture quality and offers some worthwhile extra channels.