What do you think?

From reading through these forums, there seem to be a lot of people having more problems with a wide variety of products, from different manufactures than anything else. So what do you think, would you agree that they have been rushed into the market to meet a new technology and customer base...

Rushed into the market?

Digital TV was introduced in 2000 in Australia. If you think 5 years later is rushed in to the market in electronic industry terms you are way behind the eight ball.

What you need to remember with this and every forum on any subject is that two types of people generally frequent them. There are the "enthusiasts" and the people with problems looking for answers. Both of those subsets of owners only amount to a very small minority of total ownership.

To give you an example.
People claim that around 12,000 Topfields have been sold in Australia. There are at most 50 regular Topfield contributors to this forum, most fall into the 'enthusiast" category. Maybe another 100 - 150 people have posted queries regarding the Topfield and most of those queries are questions that could have been answered by RTFM. In terms of overal numbers several hundred (of which very few actually have problems) is hardly an indication that a product has been rushed to market.
Other products have similar numbers some more, some less but again hardly and indication that a complete technology has been rushed to market in terms of the overall numbers of products being sold.

Perhaps "rushed to market" isn't the correct term, but the technological side of things - as far as set top boxes are concerned, as well as the networks' own handling of the technology - has been a complete shambles.

I'm now using my third STB. It, like the previous two, does work. But also like the other two, it has some major problems. You simply don't find problems like these on major-brand equipment. Some of this undoubtedly comes from the fact that early set top boxes were just modified satellite receivers kludged to work with the DVB standard we use here (and some still are - check out what's behind the "press here" panel on the new Opentel PVR :-)

Along with that, we have networks that can't get their heads around the technology. No EPGs, now/next crashing constantly and inaccurate, white dots and dashes, 16:9 programs shown in 4:3 format (this means you, SBS, with Rockwiz last Saturday!), lacklustre MPEG encoding, etc etc etc.

Rushed to market? Maybe not. Launched with a whimper rather than a bang? Absolutely.

There are a lot of people out there that simply won't buy dodgy unknown brands, most of wich aren't actually electronics companies at all but rather are simply importers/rebadgers.



Most of the "normal" consumers who I know who have STBs have problems with them. 100% of them don't know about this forum until I tell them. I have two friends who simply took their STBs back for a refund and said "screw digital TV". Why? Because the "manufacturers" (who actually weren't) were no help, the thing didn't work properly and they got fed up. I can't say I blame them. As a tech-savvvy person with years of experience with this sort of stuff, even I get frustrated by the lacklustre attention to detail and quality control with these devices. I have no such issues with my Sony and Pioneer DVD players, my 15 year-old Panasonic TV or any of the other major-brand gear I own. Yet often with these STBs and PVRs I feel like I'm the beta-testing guinea pig - and I'm paying for the privilege.

Some interesting broad brush numbers.
DBA recently claimed that 500,000 STB's had been sold in Australia.
There are approximately 8900 members of this forum, that is the total forum not just this section. This represents something like 1.8% of STB owners.
The top 550 forum members have each made over 50 posts. This represents something like 0.1% of STB owners.
The top 50 (representing 0.01% of or one in every 10,000 STB owners) posters have made 56,736 posts representing 32% of all opinion expressed on the entire forum.

I don't personally see a lot of problems with STB's in here. A few cheapy units breaking down, problems that are fixed with firmware upgrades and so forth. Modern tehnology is much like that, computers especially.

Not much you can do.

I got a wintal pvr-x10 last week and personally I'd give it 9 out of 10. I did do research on it before I bought, and really it should get 10 out of 10 for my expectations. It's still new technology, and I like exactly what it has been able to give me.

I struggled to make an informed choice on purchasing a DVR. In my view, these issues make life tough for a lot of consumers:

* The marketing boys have really gone to town on the spin
* There are many sales people out there in electronics stores who are not
across the technology - and dont want to admit it.
* We are suffering here in Aus from a combination of a small market and the
decision to have an aussie flavour standard for digital TV. we may not get
the range of technology/products that other countries will. E.g. - will we see
a real digital DVR? Will we ever see a real PVR properly integrated into a
fully-featured EPG with a rich suite of search and filter functions?

I found my DVR incredibly limited compared to the impression created by the marketing hype. And so many aspects of the 'advice' i got from sales people was contradictory or just plain wrong. From my experience, i don't think the manufacturers of DVR's have matched the feature set and ease of use of good old fashioned VCRs as yet - and DVR technology is supposed to give us so much more!

Thanks everyone for your feedback, i't's been interesting to see other peoples opinions on this issue. Keep it comming...

Rushed to market - yep I'd agree. There are far too many boxes that haven't been properly tested in the field.

The major brands are the biggest culprits. They seem to have just found the cheapest OEM box they could, whacked their badge and a 200% markup, and hoped they'd sell on the basis of their name/image alone.

DTV transmissions are still not 100% consistent or stable - again a factor of (a) newish technology and ( we're Australia - TV/communications are always done in a half-arsed way (pair gain phone line anyone?)

This is all valid but isn't a result of units being "rushed to the markt".

I guess the other option of not rushed to the market is to wait and I'm not a big fan of that either!

I have three SD/STBs, A Thomson DT1352TH, a TEAC DVB400 and now a Topfield TF5000pvrt. The latter two still hooked up and the Thomson is put way for emergency use. All have worked 100% out of the box and have never had a problem with any of them.
I think the picture quality alone make it worthwhile, plus widescreen and better audio.
The big problem I see is the TV broadcasters themselves and their "drag their heels in the dirt" attitude and maybe the fact that they have to broadcast in so many modes at the moment has something to do with it. Must be costing them heaps. Hopefully as the extintion of analogue gets closer they may start extracting their fingers and give us REAL digital TV.. Having such a small market doesn't help either.
HD digital has to be the biggest disappointment after reading posts in different digital TV forums, which is one reason I have saved myself the expense and stuck with low end SD WS TV(CRT) and will wait till the dust settles(I should live so long)..
There appears to be very little technical know how in the retail side of things as well from my experience. Thank goodness when I was still working I had years of experience in digital satellite TV and at least had that to get me through the fog...

But that does reply on their BEING firmware upgrades. The Strong 5200/5290 never got firmware fixes for its fatal bugs.



So did I at first (and don't get me wrong, I still like the little beast!) But let's wait until you encounter the Wintal's own particular quirks - the way it has a habit of stopping playback in the middle of a show for no particular reason, and setting the "continue playback" marker back to the start of the file. Or the way it has been reported to completely lock up during timer recording, requiring you to shut off mains power to regain control of your box; the show you were recording is largely lost. That last one happened to me a few weeks ago.

And last night, while watching my recording of Survivor (!!), the Wintal suddenly switched to playing back something else off the hard disk (not sure quite what it was!) in stutter-motion. Hitting stop then "continue playback" sent me back to the start of Survivor, which still had the remainder of the show after the point where it freaked out on the previous play.

A firmware update is seriously needed. Will we get one? Time will tell.

I bought a Topfield, played around with it, found it useful and went out and bought another one. Now I got two to play around with. But I am not an enthusiast like so many around here. I use those machines to record programs I use to record on VCR’s, no more no less and without pushing any enthusiasm, I would hate going back.

I stick one into the caravan when I hit the road and I haven’t found a spot jet where I can’t get a digital signal. So I’m a happy guy. O and by the way, I created a large, about 150 DVD’s, film library including about the same number of serial disks tanks to this great innovation.

On the way over the last year I find some poor soles sitting on the fence waiting for something to happen in the hope that they be blessed with wisdom. That wets my eyes and I start clacking, invoking in me the urge to give them a momsey cuddle.