Dual recordings
 

There were two main reasons that I dropped NTL DTV and chose Sky instead, poor picture quality on NTL and the advances Sky had made with Sky+.

With Sky+ I can now record two different digital channels at the same time using the one box with built in recorder, but need two NTL boxes and two recorders to do the same on NTL.

When will NTL catch up and provide a similar service to Sky+ ?

Maxtor are already working on a system that will provide up to six different video streams from one HDD http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/35932.html

Are NTL working on STBs with built in recorders and multiple tuners or can't they produce such a box that runs cool enough to prevent picture breakup?

Re: Dual recordings
 

Don't see why NTL cannot give this facility. The technology is obviously there as Pace do one for Freeview as well. :confused:

http://www.argos.co.uk/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?storeId=10001&langId=-1&catalogId=1751&productId=86142&Trail=C$cip=12724 >C$cip=12779&categoryId=12779

Granted you would have to buy one, but thats the same with anything such as a video recorder, dvd player or plasma tv or widescreen tv so if people want it and are willing to pay for it then give it to them.

Smacks of lack of customer focus on the part of NTL, "let's just give em the basics", mentality.

Re: Dual recordings
 

There are a few threads about this already.

http://forum.nthellworld.co.uk/showt...ghlight=ntl%2B

I agree completely with you though. This is a feature that I would be really interested in. I've just built a Windows Media Centre but its not reliable and crashes periodically. It can only record one channel at a time.

I have considered moving to Sky+ but the cost is unjustifiable for me at the moment. There is also the hassle factor to consider as well..

Re: Dual recordings
 

I know that there are other threads talking about Sky+ but I started this as a result of seeing the Register article and wondering if multiple recording facilities could technically be put in a NTL box. My NTL box, when I had it, used to get far hotter than any Sky box that I have seen with the viewing cards being badly scorched on each of the five or six boxes that I went through. I used to suffer from very bad picture quality with every NTL box that I had with freezing, stuttering and pixallation and these problems got worse when the outside temperature rose. NTL engineers told me that heat was a problem and that they could solve the immediate problem, but the fix would mean that problems returned when the weather cooled. If heat is a problem with NTL boxes then the extra heat generated by using multiple tuners could make them unviable. It may be that the heat problem is due to NTL wanting to pay as little as possible for the boxes and that spending a bit more may solve the problem. Only those in the know at NTL can tell us if that's the case. Come on you NTL people, what are your views on mulple tuner PVR NTL boxes?

Re: Dual recordings
 

There is a lot going on behind the scenes that people never get to see. Only seeing it from the Ex CWC side advances have been made, slowly, but the company is focusing on stability of the existing platform and reducing churn of current customers as a priority. From this angle development and supply of a different technology will be very slow, look how long it has taken to release the latest Samsung boxes !!!

Re: Dual recordings
 

If NTL are focusing on reducing churn then they are not doing a very good job. They are falling behind their competitors in every area and churn can only increase if they do not have the technology that customers want and at a price that is competitive. Maybe if customers had something to look forward to they may be less prone to jump ship so why keep secret what is going on behind the scenes?

Re: Dual recordings
 

I hardly think that getting a third party, (Pace) to give them a box with twin tuners and a HDD when they already do so for Sky, Freeview and abroad then selling them on is going to impact on the stability of the platform and would probably mean a huge chunk of customers that are thinking of leaving, particularly to Sky+ would remain loyal.
As I said, if the customers want it, give it to them. Is the customer not always right.
:naughty: Opps I forgot it's NTL were talking about.

Re: Dual recordings
 

I cannot agree more but as the whole company is run around facts and figures nothing is more impotant than making the numbers work regardless of what happens to the customers. If the customer is lucky they get a box that is reliable, I have a 1000 version and it has lasted for 4 years !!!

Re: Dual recordings
 

The current boxes are passive cooled, no fans, this is also why the box is fairly large, more space for heat to dissapate. You can add more to the box by actively cooling it and fans are fairly silent these days.

My Mother in Laws Scientific Atlanta 8000 PVR on Time Warner Cable hums in use, part of that is the HDD, might be a fan in there, but its still pretty quiet, not as quiet as the NTL boxes though.

Also nowadays you get more on each chip, so the box might only need 4 chips wheras the original box 1000 boxes needed 10 to do the same jobs, thus running hotter.

Re: Dual recordings
 

???? :confused:

Admittedly ntl are still screwing certain things up, but quarter upon quarter, the figures show reduced churn and increased net customers.

Many customers may be jumping ship, but many more are embarking. :)

And no, I'm not sticking up for ntl regardless, just using FACTS. :rolleyes:

Re: Dual recordings
 

Personally, that would point more towards more effective recruitment and marketing rather than dramatic improvement in services - credit where it's due and all, well done to them for getting the more people in, but their retention plan needs a little work :)

Re: Dual recordings
 

Good post, and all agreeable :)

Re: Dual recordings
 

Slipping off topic, but recruitment, so you mean an improvement in the customer service experience.

Marketing - where - I turn on the radio and hear BlueYonder adverts. The most I see NTL mentioned in adverts is those for AOL BB. NTL BB is rarely advertised, at least where I loook anyway.

Re: Dual recordings
 

I don't doubt what you say OB but churn is a long term issue and how much is churn reduced by offering incentives to customers thinking of leaving that mean NTL is not getting the full potential from those customers. The longer that NTL leave the situation as it is the more chance that churn will increase.

Look at Broadband and NTL do not offer a 2Mb service, are dearer than many ADSL suppliers for every tier, etc, etc.

Look at DTV and NTL are way behind Sky with PVR and eTV.

Look at telephony and NTL are dearer for calls than many suppliers via BT lines.

I know that in some of these cases NTL are actively trying to catch up but at the moment it is still "coming soon". The more people that switch from NTL to other suppliers, the more that they will broadcast the fact that they have something better or cheaper.

Re: Dual recordings
 

Although I want a box with this facility, and will pay extra for it, I bought this up on .com and somebody told me is was looked at and decided it wasn't viable at the time. Proppin (I think) also gave a whole list of technical reasons why it couldn't be done (basically coming down to it's not practical in the current size boxes). It would also cost too much to replace the current boxes. When I suggested the user pay for the box, I was told NTL's billing system is not equiped to do this.

How many users does sky + have? Last I heard it was something like 100000 out of 6 million sky users. If it has enough users, maybe we can persuade NTL it is viable for them to look at introducing a similar service?

Re: Dual recordings
 

Mods - if i'm going way off topic or owt here please feel free to split this topic out :)

Hiya, Marketing is an odd creature, and who you're aiming to recruit aren't necessarily best found through certain routes. What I imagine has happened is research has been carried out to see which demographics sign up for NTL most readily, and the methods of media they're most suceptable to... I see and hear telewest ads all over the place, but then again I'm a 24 year old professional... I go to train stations, supermarkets, etc and everywhere you get NTL face to face recruiters. these are the places packed with families or executives with disposable income...

Of course, this is only just a very vague overview of how I've seen recruitment - a national campaign is a very difficult thing to co-ordinate, especially when you may have quite specific target audiences.

Re: Dual recordings
 

One problem with this that springs to mind is the necessarily restricted market for such a service. Sky potentially has access to every household in the UK, and something like 7 million existing subscribers to target advertising at. I suspect neither NTL nor Telewest have access to a large enough subscriber base to make such a service viable. The fewer 'NTL+' boxes they are likely to sell, the higher the unit price for each box would need to be, to cover development and other costs.

I think if you want such a service, best option is simply to endure the hassle and switch to someone who already provides it.

Re: Dual recordings
 

This goes back to the first post and why the customer left NTL. He was unhappy with the product and saw a future with SKY. The NTL network covers enough of the country to be in competition with SKY but the DTV product is inferior. Customers want a reliable, affordable system.

Re: Dual recordings
 

There are all kinds of reasons why NTL can't compete with Sky on a like-for-like basis. Some of them I can think of, in no particular order, are the available bandwidth for suppying channels (Sky's is vastly greater), the fact that the big channels are owned by Sky (Sky One, Sky Sports, Sky Movies...) and therefore Sky doesn't charge itself for the privilege of carrying those channels on its platform, and as I said earlier, Sky's potential subscriber base is every household in the UK (35 million?) whereas NTL's is restricted to cabled streets in limited areas of the UK.

If Sky can reach 35 million homes, and its research shows that (for the sake of argument; I don't know the right figures) 10% of the UK population are interested enough in TV on demand to buy Sky+ within 2 years, that's 3.5 million subscribers. The cost of developing the service is therefore split 3.5 million ways and the unit cost of each STB is reasonable.

NTL, on the other hand, has 'marketable' access to just 7.6 million homes for its digital services. (source). Assuming again that 10% of the UK population are interested in TV on demand, and that all of them who could take it from NTL were to do so within 2 years, then by 2006 NTL could have a little over 750,000 'NTL+' subscribers.

You don't have to be a boffin to work out that if Sky can sell 3.5 million Sky+ boxes, and NTL can sell only 750,000 NTL+ boxes, the unit cost of an NTL box is necessarily going to be higher.

Now I don't know any of this for certain, but I do believe it's reasonable to assume that this is a big disincentive for NTL to bother developing such a service. Of course, you could then say this is another reason why NTL and Telewest should merge, in order to increase their potential market and make a wider range of services more viable.

Re: Dual recordings
 

But... NTL and Telewest are both moving down a path that takes them to the same basic platform. This would mean that between them they have access to potentially 40-50% of the sky plus customer base. That and falling prices leading to this becoming standard technology.

The cable box is already availible in the US market.
http://www.scientificatlanta.com/pro.../Exp8000HD.htm

Proppin (i think - being as I have been getting Debsy Incog and Kink mixed up I would not bet on this) has pointed out this would need tweaking for a EU market, power supply, Pal vs NTSC and probably the biggest stumbling block the software, which seems to be a problem with NTL in general.

I've used the cable future on Time Warner Cable and its fab. Time Warner Cable also let other ISPs use their local loop, like BT do with DSL. What a clever idea!

Re: Dual recordings
 

When you look at something that your competitors have that you don't have, you have to think beyond the cost of providing it but also at the cost of NOT providing it. If you take the view that it is not economically viable you risk the chance of losing a lot of customers to the opposition thereby cutting your own revenue and increasing the oppositions. The opposition, by having gained many more customers for the product recovers the cost of R & D sooner and goes on to other projects that take it even further ahead. Unit prices for the oppositions products also decreases with the larger number of takers so they win again.

Re: Dual recordings
 

I think this neatly sums up the critical weakness of the original cable TV proposition in the UK (a large number of small providers). NTL and Telewest need to merge and work on a single, coherent and cost-effective answer to the challenges from Sky (and to a lesser extent, Freeview) which have the entire country to market to.

The 'cost of not doing it' is unlikely to impress the banks at the moment, who have a huge amount of cash tied up in the two companies and will be wanting to take profits to pay that off before contemplating any big R&D.

Re: Dual recordings
 

Which is fine if you have that option, but not everyone does. Unless planning laws have changed recently, and I`m not aware that they have, technically there can only be one satellite dish per block of building if it is a block of flats. If someone else in the block has a Sky dish up and you then add a second one, technically speaking the council can order you to take it down. In practice this does not seem to happen, but would you be happy after paying out for a Sky+ box to be told that you have to take your dish down.

Of course, it is time that this planning rule was changed given the ubiquity of digital broadcast services these days, but that's a topic for another thread. :)

Re: Dual recordings
 

I was amazed at the ease with which ntl allowed me to jump ship a month ago without a fight. I was offered no incentives of any kind; the only reaction I got when I explained why I was thinking of leaving to move to Sky+ was, "Oh"!! I know that other former ntl subscribers have experienced the same.

No particular interest in reducing churn rates there. :shrug:

Re: Dual recordings
 

To be fair if they *did* offer various incentives to anyone that phoned up saying they wanted to leave, they could be in trouble for holding customers against their will - that and the fact that it would cost them a fortune in benefits for anyone who wanted it...

Re: Dual recordings
 

But your "leaving for sky+" meant that you were leaving for a product that NTL does not offer so cannot compete on.

If you were leaving for plain ol sky and DSL then they can try to make a play to keep you.

Re: Dual recordings
 

Have a peek at some of these boxes...
http://www.cedmagazine.com/ced/2003/0803/ID1_08.pdf

Re: Dual recordings
 

Mother in Laws Set Top Box costs USD650 :spin:

http://twcny.com/services/DVR/index....nkYou=One#cost

and all for only an additional $9.95 (currently $6.95) a month :eek:

The standard stbs cost aout $300 so the PVR one is an additional $350 giving a 36 month payback period.

Re: Dual recordings
 

Just a note about boxes over-heating...
I have an old Pace 1000 box (have had it for 3 or 4 years), and it's not terribly well ventilated, but it never gets too hot.
Could it be related to putting the box in 'standby' when it's not in use? All of my friends seem to leave their boxes permanently 'on', and the boxes are constantly hot. Whereas, I always put it on standby.

Just a thought...?

Re: Dual recordings
 

shouldn't really make a difference, standby only shuts off the output signal (except to the VHS SCART socket) which doesn't make that much heat as you'd notice a difference...

Re: Dual recordings
 

I read an article, I think it was in the Guardian sometime at the beginning of last month, which said Sky now had 250,000 Sky+ subscribers and the take-up rate was increasing. They had set targets of 350,000 by June I think.