59 replies to this topic

[actionman]

Hi All,
After many years with Austar and many, many repeats later and after seeing one insurance advertisement WAY too many, I decided to pull the plug!

I am in fact nearly $100 better off a month and I am quite happy in settling down to watch and enjoy free two air knowing that the content is just that free!  Who cares about the advertisements now?

Austar......You are just way too greedy!!

[pgdownload]

Congrats. Bit like giving up the cigs (or so I'm told ) If you haven't already, after three months use the money saved to buy a decent twin tuner PVR and say goodbye to the ads altogether.

Regards

Peter Gillespie

Edited by pgdownload, 16 May 2012 - 07:10 AM.

[Chopsus]

We came to this conclusion about 10 years ago when they ditched BBC World ... Then replaced it with the inferior Asia Pacific version.

[sleeptalker]

I have been thinking of cancelling also, but have decided to  wait to see the impact of the Foxtel takeover.

[davmel]

actionman, on 15 May 2012 - 06:50 PM, said:

I am in fact nearly $100 better off a month and I am quite happy in settling down to watch and enjoy free two air knowing that the content is just that free!  Who cares about the advertisements now?

It's like a crazy addiction for some people. It takes a few months to adapt to watching TV from other sources before the inevitable self-pondering question arises "Why did I ever waste that much money on Foxtel/Austar for so long?". You can almost fly to Europe for an annual holiday for the price of a platinum Foxtel package. So why waste your money watching a documentary on Europe (in psuedo "HD") when you can be there!

sleeptalker, on 16 May 2012 - 11:54 AM, said:

I have been thinking of cancelling also, but have decided to  wait to see the impact of the Foxtel takeover.

LOL. I wouldn't hold your breath on there being fewer funeral insurance plan ads after the merger! With the money saved Foxtel might even create a new channel totally dedicated to showing funeral insurance ads just in case you haven't seen enough of them on every other channel.

[actionman]

Amongst all of the cheesed off things that used to really cheese me off was the so called long weekends viewing, where I could sit back and enjoy my world of entertainment only to find a back to back weekend of all of the repeats that have been on a hundred times anyway! What are they all about?? I mean...this is the time I could really get my moneys worth but nope...there is no plan be...oh yes switch it off!!

Thanks Peter G we think alike, I will be shopping this weekend for a PVR, one I can call my very own.

Oh and one more thing....Austar are telling to take the decoding box to the Post Office and post it back to them?? Yeah right, drive to my local post office, find a park, queue up for half an hour and send it back to them....you delivered it...you come and get it!

Edited by actionman, 17 May 2012 - 01:50 PM.

[foxtail]

I agree but the good woman is addicted to Pawn Stars and Storage Wars, we hardly watch any of our own movies anymore, The Mystar (that's what they call it what a laugh) box has been replaced but its still junk, resets & freezes at times, then if I see one more repeat series or insurance advert think I'll scream, now some bright spark has changed the Austar EPG, looks awful and sometimes takes 15 seconds to load, getting very near to saying goodbye.

[DrP]

<phone rings, DrP answers>
Hello, this is Austar calling to confirm your service call.  Please press 1 to continue
'1'

*click*

....
....
....

<phone rings, DrP answers>
Hello, this is Austar calling to confirm your service call.  Please press 1 to continue
'1'

*click*

....
....
....

<phone rings, DrP answers>
Hello, this is Austar calling to confirm your service call.  Please press 1 to continue
'1'

*click*


*sigh*

Stay tuned for the next exciting episode of 'How to not provide service to your customers'.

[actionman]

Well, they keep ringing me up after 7.00pm...when are you going to returned you decoder box and remote?...what a cheek! After 7.00pm when I'm sitting down watching and enjoying free to air? the bloody nerve of them! It just goes to message bank and I delete it.

DrP..if you want to confuse their switchboard...just keep hitting the # key and it confuses it eventually and goes to an operator.

Austar had set up in my Local Mall as my wife and I walked past, I'm thinking "Please, please, ask me, please go on, I know you want to" my wife tells me "Don't you dare!"

Foxy...big money to pay for Pawn Stars and Storage wars and in due cause she will have seen them all and they will start all over again! And when they go into the commercial breaks you will get the insurance ads again...

Do you know which set of ad's I absolutely hated?? The bloody TimeLife Music ad's...ad's for the Music boxed sets, they used to got on for years, they were on and on and you knew exactly how mush more to had to endure before they finished! AAGGghhh!

Moonman

[minty]

Well I'm loving the 9 live games of AFL ad free siren to siren this year, worth the price for this alone. Add in every cricket tour live, EPL live, and the European and USPGA tours live and for me makes it a bargain. All my footy shows during the week, documentaries, etc. I record and watch at my convenience as suggested by Austar themselves, making them basically ad free by fast forwarding at 30x speed. The bonus of sending remote recordings via iPhone is more cream on top. All movies ad free and lots in Dolby Digital sound, never see that on free to air. Each to their own but in my case I'm a very happy customer.

Edited by seatonrocks, 01 June 2012 - 08:51 AM.

[actionman]

seatonrocks, on 01 June 2012 - 08:50 AM, said:

Well I'm loving the 9 live games of AFL ad free siren to siren this year, worth the price for this alone. Add in every cricket tour live, EPL live, and the European and USPGA tours live and for me makes it a bargain. All my footy shows during the week, documentaries, etc. I record and watch at my convenience as suggested by Austar themselves, making them basically ad free by fast forwarding at 30x speed. The bonus of sending remote recordings via iPhone is more cream on top. All movies ad free and lots in Dolby Digital sound, never see that on free to air. Each to their own but in my case I'm a very happy customer.

But paying $60+ dollars upfront for the crappy starter pack + the cost of your added  channels + the cost of your Happy Star Box, I doubt your in front my good friend! I had all of that stuff as well, remote recording etc it's just a novelty that's all, just something to show your friends and something else to also justify your subscription cost.

Life after Austar? loving it!
FTA?? I'm not paying for it!
Recording my FTA on my Toppy and fast forwarding the Ad's...brilliant.
Tranferring my home media from my PC to my Toppy and managing the content?? Loving it.

Oh I'm also sorry to say but this is the 'Unhappy Customer Thread'... I think you misread it...you need the other one. :-)

Edited by actionman, 27 June 2012 - 05:27 PM.

[mello yello]

actionman, on 27 June 2012 - 05:16 PM, said:

But paying $60+ dollars upfront for the crappy starter pack + the cost of your added  channels + the cost of your Happy Star Box, I doubt your in front my good friend! I had all of that stuff as well, remote recording etc it's just a novelty that's all, just something to show your friends and something else to also justify your subscription cost.

Life after Austar? loving it!
FTA?? I'm not paying for it!
Recording my FTA on my Toppy and fast forwarding the Ad's...brilliant.
Tranferring my home media from my PC to my Toppy and managing the content?? Loving it.

Oh I'm also sorry to say but this is the 'Unhappy Customer Thread'... I think you misread it...you need the other one. :-)

LOL

I just got a free Happy Star "upgrade" with a free 3 month HD trial just to get HDMI connectivity after I discovered you can get the Mystar HD box and have all the extra features disabled, such as recording, HD channels etc and continue using the box for the same price as the old standard box. You dont have to pay extra for a Mystar HD box if you dont have the features enabled....didnt know that

and what a load of crap it is

• the FTA part of the tuner will only scan for local channels even though I am able to get metro channels with my TV tuner
  
• the HDMI PQ is very hard to spot a difference between the S Video I had previously. Could be the 20 cent HDMI cable but Im not going to spend any more than I have to
  
• FTA sound quality (on the Mystar) is considerably inferior to the TV tuner version when comparing the same HD channels against eachother
  
• the only way I consider to be any way in front is I have saved on 1 set of audio cables...
  
• HD channels definitely show improvement over the SD version but I refuse to pay an extra $20 p month just to get  HD
  
• the only reason I have PTV is sport, everything else on that service is just fluffed over reruns and repetitive b grade ads that would never make it to FTA anyway

didnt have it any more than half an hour before I realised what a load of unuseable novelty fluff it is

Edited by mello yello II, 30 June 2012 - 08:14 AM.

[mello yello]

oh, forgot to mention...

when I go to change channels and hold the button down to try and speed up the process, it just goes and skips about 50 channels before it stops ( on all remotes so its not the remote)

favourites is a crock as you are limited to the number of channels you can add to favourites so you are doomed to having to scroll through and endless load of waffle rubbish channels you dont have in your subscription just to go from FOX Sports1 HD to Sky News ( for example )

havent had it long enough to report any other bugs

Edited by mello yello II, 30 June 2012 - 08:00 AM.

[nbound]

The tuner doesnt scan, it just checks a predefined channel list.

[mello yello]

the installer said something like that, that its limited to what  its programmed for and when you power reset it you can see it "find" the various transmitters by name, anyway I wont be using that feature either, others may find it useful for recording etc

[actionman]

mello yellow ll...I feel for you! Lured into a false sense of security.

They gave me the SD happy star box for free if I continued to stay a customer and then changed their mind without my knowledge and made it a 2 year offer.

During that time I had:

Numerous unexplained reboots, losing FTA channels continuously, freezing  and not forgetting the poor quality transmissions.

I would ring up the help desk, many minutes later after navigating through their maze of number prompts I would actually get to someone who wouldn't know their ar@e from their elbow and we would go through the steps, the same steps everytime to fix my issues.

Complete and utter waste of time.

[mello yello]

actionman, on 01 July 2012 - 11:44 AM, said:

mello yellow ll...I feel for you! Lured into a false sense of security.

They gave me the SD happy star box for free if I continued to stay a customer and then changed their mind without my knowledge and made it a 2 year offer.

so they tried to extort you by threatening to give you more of their crappy service huh LoL

timely post...just had my cherry reset this morning

took over 5 minutes of an Austar logo with "loading"  before it came back, I would assume if I were recording a penalty shootout it would have been lost ?

[actionman]

The dreaded resets huh! I would change the channel and it would reset...always when there was something half decent on, suppose watching the logo and the scanning process was sometimes better than the televised content...sometimes I thought, I wished I could record that....

Not to mention the loss of signal everytime we got a storm, the fluttering of the image used to drive me around the bend along with the preciding error message....If there is a storm in your area etc with the advance in technology, why does this happen??

Second rate service and people put up with it.

[Chopsus]

There's a Sucker born every minute and Austar rely on it

[mello yello]

Happy Birthday for yesterday btw LoL

spose I could always do my dough on 1300 movie titles instead of having to pay to watch SPORT

Edited by mello yello II, 01 July 2012 - 04:56 PM.

[mello yello]

actionman, on 01 July 2012 - 01:39 PM, said:

The dreaded resets huh! I would change the channel and it would reset...always when there was something half decent on, suppose watching the logo and the scanning process was sometimes better than the televised content...sometimes I thought, I wished I could record that....

Not to mention the loss of signal everytime we got a storm, the fluttering of the image used to drive me around the bend along with the preciding error message....If there is a storm in your area etc with the advance in technology, why does this happen??

Second rate service and people put up with it.

youre talking about the SD box ? isnt the HD box meant to be slightly "better" ?

I pointed out the fluctuating signal response to the tech while he was installing it...he said a cloud must have rolled by LoL

at least theyve got a sense of humour

how long have you been clean ? and is there a patch available for us still addicted to SPORT ?

Edited by mello yello II, 01 July 2012 - 03:15 PM.

[DrP]

'Slightly' being the word.

[mello yello]

if this is slightly better...whoa

I managed to get the HD version fully featured installed for free plus 3 months of HD free by "hinting" I may continue to pay for the service after the trial , knowing full well I wont be, but just pointing out to anyone who has a dodgy old box and thinks that "upgrading" to a Mystar HD would lock them in to have to pay the extra whatever...you dont

you just continue to use the box with the "features" disabled and you have HDMI at no extra cost


hang on Ive just got to go reset my box again...brb

Edited by mello yello II, 01 July 2012 - 04:40 PM.

[Chopsus]

mello yello II, on 01 July 2012 - 03:01 PM, said:

Happy Birthday for yesterday btw LoL

spose I could always do my dough on 1300 movie titles instead of having to pay to watch SPORT

1346 actually, with another 4 on the way from Amazon.uk (48 Hours, Immortals, Adele and Strictly Ballroom) all for less than the monthly cost of ArseTar.

You seem a little obsessed by my BD collection Mellow ...after 15 years it adds up ... As does your Austar subscription ... The difference is I have something tangible to show for all that dosh ... The dollar value would have actually been more if we had continued with ArseTar.... I guess I could have saved up and bought a second hand Ferrari .... As could you, instead of fantasising about it so much.

P.S. if you are serious about your international sport you would be way better off using the live Internet feeds, and most of them are free.

Edited by Chopsus, 01 July 2012 - 09:39 PM.

[actionman]

The Sports Pack is the only viable thing ArseTar' (Like this Chopsus, I may use it from now on) has to offer. If only you could pick you own channels  and pay say $2.00 per month but you had to stick to a limit and build your own Entertainment Experience? And bypass all of the crap they throw at you. THEN the choice would be back to the subscriber.

Not this crappy starter pack.....4 channels of horseracing? blur! NITV?? Australian Christian Channel??? TV Shopping Network?? Aurora and the list goes on...not to mention the A-Pac and the SKY Buiness News..boring...who in the world watches these channels?? Great choice eh?

Then you pick your other packages only to find the SciFi channel is dropped in another load of crap and the other packages are interlapped with channels from the other packages.

Movies Channels? maybe, but only Showtime for a month. Quote from the ArseTar site "A true movie buff knows the best lines – even before De Niro says them. For you, "I've seen it before" is never an excuse. You'll watch your favourite movies again and again. And you'll love every minute of it." A great line to hide there is nothing but repeat after repeat and the movies are years old!!

Nuff said.