9 replies to this topic

[Tassie Devil]

Not trying to rubbish Austar as I realise many enjoy their programs and get considerable pleasure from them.  But we cannot find enough of interest to justify the $40 per month sub, and yes, I know that is cheap compared to what many pay.  My wife has scoured the Austar mag to see what else might be of interest besides movies but did not make any discoveries.

I got sick of literally spending hours using the net Movie site to study what movies (the main attraction for us) were on offer that we had not seen or interested us.  We are rather fussy about acting and production qualities but only found 4 movies to record us for the whole of January.  And we do look at a lot of TV, but we find ABC & SBS + a few odd commercial programs keep us fully amused.

And I have not been very impressed with their SD PVR.  The program guide can be flakey and the resulting recording quality is ok, and on a par with FTA, but not nearly as good as we are getting via satellite for ABC & SBS from Optus D satellite.  That SD signal upscales very nicely to HD standards on good material, as most of it is.

We subscribed to Austar for a few years some time ago, then switched to Select when recording on our own PVR was blocked, so have come back into the fold to try it out again but guess this is the end of subscriber TV for us.

John

[SLE355]

Did they offer you a discount to stay on?

Mines getting disconnected in 28 days unless Speed channel comes on before then.

[Tassie Devil]

SLE355, on Jan 12 2011, 06:25 PM, said:

Did they offer you a discount to stay on?

Mines getting disconnected in 28 days unless Speed channel comes on before then.

No, the present deal is a special offer anyway.  About all that might have tempted me would have been to offer the other set of moviesw instead of Movie One etc.

John

[Tassie Devil]

I got a call last week from Austar trying to entice me to stay on but the best they could offer was a switch to Showtime movies for a total of $60 per month.  Now this was probably a very good offer compared to what some people pay but we decided to decline.  We do not look at Nat Geo, Discovery etc so it is only movies that interest us.  For January we only found 4 new movies to record and it took more time than it was worth to locate them.  Maybe Showtime would offer more but I'm not prepared to spend hours trolling through their offerings to discover "gems" only to end up finding half were to our taste.    Besides, I'm not very impressed with the MyStar box - it developed a fault and would not transmit audio via digital, only analog + only has a mediocre interface IMHO.

As we were concentrating on movies only, that $60 could be more profitably spent on buying Blu ray movies from the UK or renting from bigpond.  Yes, I am a very hard to please customer.

We find we have more than enough to view, mainly from the ABC & SBS and are receiving top audio & video quality via the Optus D satellite.    I have been using a Topfield 5000 PVR but it is a bit clunky so I did try a new Topfield 7700.  However it is faulty + contrary to what I was told, responds to the same remote codes as our 7100 and 5000 - an intolerable situation, so I'm in the process of trying to return it.  But that is another story and is OT here!

John

[digitalj]

I think pay tv could dramatically improve their value if they just halved the amount of repetition that occurs within a month, i.e. currently the same movie can sometimes be seen half a dozen times or so with-in a month and then not be seen again for several months. This means that if you stumbled onto a movie by accident and only caught the last bit of the last airing, you then have to wait a long time to see it fully, but by the time that it's on again, you may have forgotten what the movie was called and miss it again.

If they were to change so that instead of repeating a movie 6 or so times in a month for it to not be seen again for several months to repeat once or twice and show it every second or third month, it would mean you're more likely to catch a full airing of a movie you accidentally stumbled onto and that there would be more movies available each month which means you're more likely to find a movie to watch or find more movies within a month.

The same applies to any entertainment channel.

[pgdownload]

Might work, however the PayTV model until recently seemed to assume recording wasn't an option. So a show would be scheduled in many timeslots over a short period to give all viewer types the chance to tune in. Although recording PAY-PVRs are becoming the norm, I think that's still a way off.

Besides unless you stumbled across the last airing of '6' late then in the existing model you have up to 5 out of 6 chances to reschedule another viewing within a few weeks, rather than wait a month or two as you propose?

Regards

Peter Gillespie

[SLE355]

I'm moving to foxtel so mine will def be disconnected on the 10th of Feb, interesting to see if they ring and try and get me to stay on.

[digitalj]

pgdownload, on Jan 31 2011, 02:13 PM, said:

Besides unless you stumbled across the last airing of '6' late then in the existing model you have up to 5 out of 6 chances to reschedule another viewing within a few weeks, rather than wait a month or two as you propose?

Regards

Peter Gillespie

I think you misread my post. I said that currently you have to wait several months if you missed a series of airings of that movie. Under the proposal, it would be only 1 or 2 months of waiting.

[DrP]

Take advantage of automatic notifications via email.  Showtime and, IIRC, Movie Network both have the feature to have an email or SMS sent to you to remind you of an upcoming event.  If you don't like their facility, there's always the option of sites such as yourtv (even though its become a bit of a disaster of late).

Edited by DrP, 01 February 2011 - 06:28 AM.

[vallatv]

i started watching PUSH one night but it was getting late and had to turn it off with still about 40mins to go, that was a month ago and i haven't seen it on since so still haven't seen the ending. I don't have mystar (not willing to pay more than i am) and my recorder is packing away as we are renovating.
But the 2012 movie has been on 1000 times since and I saw it ages ago on Bluray.