A lot of unhappy users today, seems that the Playout systems for NOW TV and SKY GO aren't working properly. Many Rugby customers going a little spare on the customer forums.
If only there was some means of delivering TV programmes, from some sort of network of tall steel towers, each covering a area about 50 miles across, or better still from something really high up in the sky, that almost every dwelling could point a device at, to capture the signal ?
My 86 year old mother struggles with DTT to be honest, you're right, her generation will struggle with alternative platforms, just as they struggle with mobile phones, computers, cashpoint machines, and all sorts of other things younger people are perfectly comfortable with.
What does she struggle with? Years ago I had an 80 something aunt who had a freeview box and it was a struggle at times, but that was in the days when she could get confused between analogue and digital and the box was seperate so there was the 'this remote does this and that remote does that' confusion.
Now those days are gone, assuming that they have a modern telly there's no real difference between operating that or an old analogue telly.... BBC1 is still button 1, Corrie is on 3 etc.
Of course it's quite wrong to assume that pensioners are technically inept. The baby boomers are now in their 70s, they've lived through a lot of technological innovation and many will have had to get used to computers at work in their 40s and 50s. It won't be such an issue in the next decade and beyond
My 86 year old mother struggles with DTT to be honest, you're right, her generation will struggle with alternative platforms, just as they struggle with mobile phones, computers, cashpoint machines, and all sorts of other things younger people are perfectly comfortable with.
What does she struggle with? Years ago I had an 80 something aunt who had a freeview box and it was a struggle at times, but that was in the days when she could get confused between analogue and digital and the box was seperate so there was the 'this remote does this and that remote does that' confusion.
To be fair, it's not DTT per se (although, believe or not, number one gripe is the 'red screen of death, for local news switch to SD caption', she regularly moans about it, despite me trying to explain in layman's terms, why), but the switching in and out of the PVR, and getting confused when it's in E-E mode, not realising she's watching its own tuner, and not the TV's, playing DVDs, and getting similarly confused how to get back to TV, and the bloody 'environmental' feature, which means if the TV remote doesn't get touched in four hours (which it often won't, if she's on a DVD or 'Scandi Drama' binge watch) the TV switches itself off, and by the time she's got it back on, she's missed 60-90 seconds of action, which then triggers off trying to rewind either the PVR or DVD, which causes more compound problems.......and so on.
She does say to me,
'Just you wait until you're my age.........! '
Of course it's quite wrong to assume that pensioners are technically inept. The baby boomers are now in their 70s, they've lived through a lot of technological innovation and many will have had to get used to computers at work in their 40s and 50s. It won't be such an issue in the next decade and beyond
My generation (I was born in 1963) started their working lives without computers, and smoke filled offices and workshops, and I remember having to get special permission to use the company fax machine ! I'll end it (or it'll end me!) in a completely electronic environment. Even now I find it strange to use a pen, and I often can't decipher what I've written !
I was going to reply with the following hours ago, but decided it was rambly and too off topic, but I see others have similwr sentiments so I'll do it anyway, given that my iPad appears to have remembered it...
I Don't buy the argument that old people struggle with technology any more than young people do, or middle aged people. For many people, young or old, the combination of set top boxes, recorders, various remote controls and multiple scart or hdmi connections
were
quite baffling. I've found that given an integrated television and a PVR (or better still, something like a chromecast), people are just as confident using it as they were with an analogue set and a video recorder.
I have to say, the interim measure of people being told in order to go digital they could keep their analogue set, buy a set top box (resulting in crappy aspect ratios, 'baffling' scart leads, changing channels to watch regional programmes etc etc) probably did a lot to confuse people and it's led to people thinking digital television is complicated. At one point we had a analogue telly, an onDigital box, a VCR, and a DVD player, plus a hifi wired in too. I set it all up properly, and set about trying to explain how to work it all. It's no wonder everyone else gave up when I explained how to record a digital channel by changing the input on the vcr to AV, and leaving the set top box on the channel to record, leaving any analogue channel to watch live.
At the end of the day, regardless of what data it carries, widespread propagation of "radio" signals from transmitter masts is still an incredibly important part of modern civilisation.
'red screen of death, for local news switch to SD caption'
So leave it on SD
Quote:
the switching in and out of the PVR, and getting confused when it's in E-E mode, not realising she's watching its own tuner, and not the TV's, playing DVDs, and getting similarly confused how to get back to TV,
So get her into the habit of watching everything through the PVR... what's E-E mode?
Quote:
and the bloody 'environmental' feature, which means if the TV remote doesn't get touched in four hours (which it often won't, if she's on a DVD or 'Scandi Drama' binge watch) the TV switches itself off, and by the time she's got it back on, she's missed 60-90 seconds of action,
and the bloody 'environmental' feature, which means if the TV remote doesn't get touched in four hours (which it often won't, if she's on a DVD or 'Scandi Drama' binge watch) the TV switches itself off, and by the time she's got it back on, she's missed 60-90 seconds of action,
Surely you can turn this off somewhere?
Unfortunately not. A lot of new TVs switch off after four hours of inactivity and it's not an option you can switch off.
If I'm honest, I've never found TV setups/configurations/wiring confusing. Maybe it makes me look like a smart arse when I say I worked out from a youngish age that all the connections are either keyed or can only go in one hole, or "this is an input so there has to be an output from it to somewhere else, oh here it is." Just made sense to me. Freeview -> VCR -> TV. Simples. Then HDMI came along and "just plug it in" rather than having to daisy-chain it old school style.
The whole "going digital" thing and the crap about digital aerials may have hindered rather than helped. All it really needed to be said was "we're going to be going digital, you can watch 30 channels instead of five, with this clever little box that connects to your TV". TVs had RF tuners and most (nearly all) had SCART and Freeview boxes had both outputs so the vast majority of them did not need replacing for digital TV.
The complication issue with VCRs was almost certainly because they didn't have digital tuners in them, only analogue ones. I dare say some later models did have Freeview tuners but it was almost certainly probably the exception to the rule. But yes it could get complicated to record something having to leave the box on channel 6, tell the video to record that (typically by Scart but sometimes RF as an extra channel on the video) and being limited to "normal" TV channels 1-5 for the duration of the recording. And then Sky+ and TIVO came along to make life easier in that respect.
With the talk of pensioners not being technically inept, my 81 year old father very much is, and struggles to tune into any channel beyond the 5 main terrestrial channels. Well, except for the BBC News channel for which I've kept on channel 80 for his convenience (deliberately set to the HD version) even though it has long since departed from that particular channel number on Freeview. One exchange that I had with him last week . . .
Dad: Greg, can you put it on Channel 4 for me?
Me: Just press number 4 on the remote, I thought you knew that already.
Dad: That's showing Countdown, I want to watch the snooker.
Me: The snooker's on ITV4.
Dad: ITV's on number 3 isn't it?
Me: No that's just ordinary ITV. You want ITV4.
Dad: But that's got Countdown on!
Me: (facepalm) Nooooo! That's Channel 4. ITV4 is on number 34 on your telly!
Dad: Oh, OK.
Ten minutes later . . .
Dad: Why can't I get the snooker on? It's still showing Countdown!
Some pensioners might not have such issues, such as the aforementioned baby boomer generation, but many older pensioners most certainly will do. When DTT/Freeview eventually goes away, whenever that actually happens in the future, if by then there isn't already a well established new system in place that's as easy to use as Freeview, many people of advanced years will definitely struggle.
the switching in and out of the PVR, and getting confused when it's in E-E mode, not realising she's watching its own tuner, and not the TV's, playing DVDs, and getting similarly confused how to get back to TV,
So get her into the habit of watching everything through the PVR... what's E-E mode?
and the bloody 'environmental' feature, which means if the TV remote doesn't get touched in four hours (which it often won't, if she's on a DVD or 'Scandi Drama' binge watch) the TV switches itself off, and by the time she's got it back on, she's missed 60-90 seconds of action,
Surely you can turn this off somewhere?
Unfortunately not. A lot of new TVs switch off after four hours of inactivity and it's not an option you can switch off.
Or the setting is buried, or doesn't affect No Signal timeouts, or it is attached to a particular picture mode.
'red screen of death, for local news switch to SD caption'
So leave it on SD
Why !? She (unlike many others of all ages) actually notices the benefit of HD
Quote:
the switching in and out of the PVR, and getting confused when it's in E-E mode, not realising she's watching its own tuner, and not the TV's, playing DVDs, and getting similarly confused how to get back to TV,
So get her into the habit of watching everything through the PVR...
I tried that for a while, too confusing, primarily because two remotes are required.
I do agree, it's more to do with familiarity (or lack of it), and not (what many wrongly assume) reduced mental capacity.
She still drives a car for instance, but she has never been exposed (until very recently) to anything electronic. My father dealt with all of that, but he's now off the scene with dementia. I've had to train her to operate petrol pumps, again driven for over 60 years, but never until recently ever had to use one
Last edited by Markymark on 16 February 2017 7:54am - 2 times in total