Tiscali TV

Apologies if this is in the wrong forum. My dad got a call from Tiscali earlier today who offered him an upgrade to our existing Broadband+Phone package, which was an upgrade to Tiscali TV. We currently have the Sky World package, and my first thought of Tiscali TV was that it was utter pants compared to what Sky had - then I became curious...

I went onto their website and looked at what was on offer. Clearly, the huge advantage they have over Sky is the vast amount of On Demand content, which has reeled me into the service. However, Tiscali TV lacks channels I watch alot on Sky, and it also lacks such services as subtitles and interactive features. Because of these factors, I was thinking about cutting down on the Sky packages which included channels Tiscali didn't have, and have Tiscali TV at the same time - gloriously, having this Tiscali package and the cut-down-Sky package leads to my Dad saving over £30 a month.

Nevertheless, websites don't offer 100% truth - I've yet to see a promo for Virgin Media which explains how slow and clunky the service can be. Therefore, I am creating this thread to ask people if Tiscali TV is any good, and what your experiences of it are like.

Many thanks

We have Tiscali TV, its not bad. We have the Variety Pack and did have the Entertainment Extra mix for a while too, the picture quality is quite good and the catch-up services are quite handy. They've recently added some of the BBC and ITV regions as well.

We got the upgrade through a phone call as we already subscribed to their broadband service but when we got Tiscali TV installed the speed of the internet shot up a bit aswell.

Thanks Jason. When you say the picture is "quite good", do you mean that the picture isn't as good as other services like Sky?

Its been a long while since we had Sky and we've never had the other services apart from freeview. The picture quality is ok, never had any problems with it breaking up.

Ah right. Cheers for that Jason.

AIUI Tiscali TV is OK - but nothing to write home about in picture quality terms. I believe it has switched from MPEG2 to H264 encoding - but runs at pretty low bitrates...

After reading up on it, it's the picture quality which is my biggest worry. One review says that when they switched to H264, the picture became very blocky and pixellated, but they have since improved the quality. Still, i'm not sure how good that improvement is.