What Happened Next - First Use

The following events took place between 8pm and 10pm on Tuesday 27th April 2010...


The Internet access is FAST - that's now a given, so I'm not going to dwell on that any further. We will continue to take snapshot measurements, and in about a week, I'll objectively qualify "fast" for you. Key points being that it "feels" faster, and the kids are happy.

The V+HD box is a bit different. We've become so used to how the Sky+ box works - the menus and buttons - and now we start again. It feels a bit clunky and laborious - feels like you have to go through more sub-menus in order to get to the key things you want. I'm sure this perception will change with prolonged use, and it'll soon become second nature.

First off, we set a couple of things to record - one-time election programmes. That was easy - the record button is a toggle - so you highlight the programme, press RECORD once and the programme goes red, press it again and it cancels the recording and goes back to white. Easy. Next, we did our Series Links. It's better and worse than Sky+. It's better because it will apparently let you pick odd and possibly non-sequential episodes of a particular show to schedule to record. I can't immediately think of why we'd want to do that, but never mind. It's worse because it doesn't seem as "smart". When you look at, say, Ashes to Ashes on Sky+ programme guide, it says "5 of 8" or something like that. On V+HD, it just describes it as being "ongoing", which is less-helpful. Also, you can programme Sky+ to record remotely from any web-browser anywhere on the planet - not sure you can do that with V+HD - need to check that.

We found a programme coming up next week that sounds a bit mad and worth watching purely out of morbid curiosity. It's called something like "Scream if you know the answer" and they put "celebrities" on a rollercoaster and make them answer trivia questions whilst screaming. I think that's about it. We tried to V+ that. Because we watch so little TV, we opted for the basic Virgin channel package. This "scream" thing is on a channel I've never heard of, and we've never viewed, called Watch. Watch isn't part of our Virgin package. So we Sky+ it. It is part of the basic Sky package. It's just typical that this should happen last night, and be our first experience of our shiny new VirginMedia package. If we didn't still have the Sky+, I guess the outcome would have been "TOUGH!". Or upgrade - ain't gonna happen! Have we done the right thing moving away from Sky? I come back to the basic point that 95% of what we watch is on BBC1/2 and ITV/Channel4. Another 4.5% is Sky1. The other 0.5% is random and unpredictable and probably doesn't matter - if we don't have something, we won't care.

We'd been Sky+ing a short true-life drama series called "Five Daughters". So parts 1 and 2 were on the Sky+ box. Last night, we decided to try watching Part 1 on BBC iPlayer. I navigated to it relatively quickly and easily, and we started watching it. We got as far as the opening sequence, and then something child/school-related happened and we put it on pause. We didn't end up getting back to it for some time - maybe half an hour. By that time, a message came up asking us if we wanted to quit. Said no - play it. A pause - then - error message. Log a call, quote code xxx. Maybe the connection timed out. Came right out of the iPlayer menu system and back to regular TV. Did the same all over again - same error. Time getting on, very tired - just want to watch it. Sky+ to the rescue again - we watched what we Sky+ed. What would we do in that situation if we didn't have Sky+? This is a taste of things to come? Is iPlayer a bit flaky?

In any domestic situation like this, you want stuff to "just work". No messing about. Nothing technical or having to put the "troubleshooting" hat on. If your domestic appliances don't deliver against that kind of SLA, then they are very rapidly outed, and better alternatives are found. In this regard, the V+HD box is off to a pretty poor start. We couldn't watch a random one-time programme we wanted to watch, and iPlayer errored out. We have yet to experience HD - there's something come up on BBC HD that we're going to watch over the weekend - we'll see how that goes.

I asked the engineer about the Ethernet and USB ports on the shiny new Samsung V+HD box. He confirmed what I'd already learnt from forum posts. USB is only useful to charge things. Ethernet is for "future use". Sheesh. My shiny new LV bluray player has Ethernet too (wired and wireless) - it plays YouTube videos in HD and connects to "plus" content online. That's for present use - come on Virigin - get with the programme!

So with "Five Daughters" watched, I think the Sky+ box is empty now. I wanted to decommission it this evening, but now I can't because of that "Scream" progamme. Again - we're not quite there yet, but the end is in sight.

Oh yeah - telephone works fine. We all just assume that, don't we? Dial-tone service and all that.