Sky Guide Music...?

NG

noggin Founding member 30 March 2008 4:44pm

Bvsh Hovse posted:

StuartPlymouth posted:

Now, Noggin, this begs the question of all those people with ex-sky boxes stuck in their cupboards, in garages or under their beds.

One of the features of Sky is that the software in the box does get regularly updated. If your box has missed an upgrade through being switched off, then you might find some features are missing. One of the obvious ones would be the changed EPG making all the radio channels start with 0. I've no idea if you could access the radio channels on such a box.

I've read tales elsewhere of digiboxes that have missed several upgrades (say, has been in the garage for 3 years) which have become useless because they then cannot understand the current versions of the software being broadcast and so fail to download it.

Yes - you are dead right - very old boxes that haven't received software updates that equip them to receive the current software being downloaded may indeed by defunct. Particularly Sony, Grundig and Panasonic boxes for which software downloads may no longer be taking place?

BH

Bvsh Hovse 30 March 2008 5:29pm

When I was being given the tupenny tour of Broadcast Centre by some friends who worked on interactive, I was shown the interactive tv test suite. They have one of every digibox ever made, including the Sky Digital IDTVs. They have to ensure that all new interactive applications work on all the boxes, even the very first box that is nearly 10 years old. They also have guidlines on how quickly certain things happen as the application loads and runs.

Sky insist on this compatibilty, probably to save them having to start swapping out boxes. But it means that developers are now having to come up with more and more convoluted ways to make newer applications work on these older boxes - when they would rather be writing applications that use the increased memory and processing power of the newer boxes. If Sky were to retire just the first 4-5 boxes then it would make their life so much easier. There can't be that many of them still in working order 10 years on.

If On Digital were still going I do wonder if they would be enforcing the same policy on their boxes. If they were then I doubt the interactive experience on Freeview would be anywhere near as good as it is now.

BH

Bvsh Hovse 30 March 2008 5:39pm

StuartPlymouth posted:

do either of you know what the FreeSat EPG will look like?

I saw a demo at an R&D open day recently, which was open to the public so I can't see it being a trade secret. However the guy demonstrating it was clear that what we saw had pretty much just been written the day before, as the EPG streams had only just started broadcast. So it was very much a quick hack, rather than finished product - so don't take any of this as hard facts!

It reminded me a lot of the EPG built into my Samsung IDTV for Freeview, except IIRC it used a palette based around the colour purple. Whether the colour scheme was taken from the freesat branding guidelines, or just happened to be the developers favourite colour I don't know!

[stands back and waits for 'The Freesat Branding Thread' to appear]

(March 2008)