I went round to a friend's house the other night and was left watching TV for a bit whilst he made a call. He seem to have quite a few channels; most of the sport ones, movie ones but none of the porn ones or most bizarrely, the God channel (I thought that was 'free' ?!). He has one of the Pace boxes, no idea which model though - it's the one with a load of buttons on the right in a oval shape.
Trying not to be blinded by the frankly, hideous pink/purple interface of the EPG, I was flicking from channel to channel and seeing what was on. However, the thing I found most annoying was that all the channels were all scattered all over the place and not in numerical order. Also all the sports, radio and regional channels weren't all lumped together which made it slightly more annoying to navigate. Is the EPG normally this messed up, or is it because they've chosen to set favourite channels or re-arrange it to suit them?
Also, whilst I was changing channels, I noticed the text saying press OK to view this channel, so I did but the channel selector didn't disappear so I thought nothing more of it and continued channel surfing, until I noticed the text had changed to 'press OK/select to add this to your reminders' or something to words to that effect. I had then decided to have a crash course in using the planner, and deleted all the events I had added - all four of them. Boy was it slow to do so and I thought the box had crashed, but it eventually responded (about 2 years later
) and all the events that I had mistakenly entered were successfully deleted.
Whose idea was it to have the dual function OK/select button?
Then a little while later I got up, dumped the remote on the sofa and got a glass of water from the kitchen and when I returned, I couldn't find the remote control that I had put there previously, so I sat down on the sofa and leant against the cushion. Unbeknown to me, his little sister had stuck the cushion on top of the remote control, so when I sat down, I accidentally triggered the BBC interactive thing, which I tried to exit. Unfortunately I couldn't seem to find a way to get out of it, despite pressing the blue (I think) button which took you back to TV, but it took ages to take me back to the TV, and I thought, again, that I had crashed the box. :o
But no, it lived, although it was now pretty slow. I continued flicking between channels and went off to the toilet for a bit. When I came back, the box had finally crashed as the sound from the radio channel that was on had stopped and the now and next had frozen and didn't respond to any of the commands from the remote control. My friend had finished the call by now and I explained to him that the whole lot just hung, and upon switching it on and off at the mains he said that it happens pretty frequently, and that it's not something to worry about (I was in... oops ... sh*t .. what have I done mode at the time
).
Even my antique-piece of an ITV digital box can move channels around and move around the interactive (albeit slowly but crashes/freezes rarely compared to ntl's box) without major problems.
From my 30 minute 'taster' of ntl digital TV, I would never want to have it, as I probably would end up hurling the box out of the nearest window after every few times it needed a reboot!
Are my experiences common of ntl's digital TV service? Is this the tip of the iceberg or have I experienced ntl's digital TV service at its worst?
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Is ntl: DTV this bad?
