Is It Me or IS TOPUPTV Anytime Rubbish?

As unfortunate as it is to accept a pleb's opinion of TUTV who merely wants to get everything under the sun whilst paying for nothing and is probably content to let mummy and daddy pay the TV ownership tax too(note my friend that Freeview and DTT are not the same thing and TUTV has always operated under entirely above board conditions on multiplexes which have always been licenced to carry pay TV channels), I have to accept that there is no way in hell that Anytime can work.

TUTV back in 2004 did fill a void that badly needed filling and I will never regret having subscribed to them in the past; but coupled with the improvement on FTA combined with the continuing downward spiral tha the pay TV channels they provide are caught in, TUTV was going downhill.

The present service, a ridiculous cut back linear service showing half of what it did before for the same money, coupled with an on demand service which needs to be left recording for weeks in order to build a decent library of programmes, just can't survive.

When C5 dealt them the crippling blow that they did earlier this year, the best TUTV could have done was admit defeat and bow out gracefully; at least it would have been noted that they would have beat off all predictions of their failure and ultimately only failed by having their broadcast space forcibly removed from them.

As it is, Anytime is overpriced cack and it's ludicrous startup costs combined with ridiculous delays in delivery (I do now wonder if the Anytime boxes were actually built to order) I cannot see as anything other than a failure.

Sadly, this will inevitably lead (almost certainly before we are too far into 2007) to the collapse of Top Up TV and the plebs claiming for a second time that DTT can't support a pay TV service when it can if one is ever allowed to operate under normal operating conditions again ('normal' meaning such basic things like not operating your service under threat of another broadcaaster pulling the rug to launch a mediocre extended channel family)

Excuse Me! Not at all in actual fact I contribute to the TV licence in my house & I DON'T expect everything for free

It would just be nice to have ABC 1 as a 24hour channel. The cost for TUTV when it came out for the amount of channels that you got was rather high.

I presume that if it had done better then they would have had more channels.

The point I'm making is those three/four channels could be put to better use & neither Sentana or Red Hot are worth paying for at all, if it had been Sky Sports 1 on the other hand then I wouldn't have a problem paying.

Ignore Cwathen's tone, Johnny 83, he's always been sniffy.

Getting back on the point, the one thing about Top Up TV that doomed it from the start was trying to offer too much, to its own detriment. Imagine if you will a drink - say vodka. Perfectly good on its own, it can stand alone as a drink and has the desired effect. But it has so much potential. So you add ice, which makes it chilled, and (in some opinions) much more pleasant to drink. The ice is an optional extra, which means your glass is a little fuller. But still the vodka can be developed. So you add a dash of Cola. Fantastic - a full glass and you've got that little bit extra than just a bog standard warm plain single vodka. But what you don't want to do is then add Red Bull, or too much coke, or so much ice that there's more ice than vodka.

Freeview is the Vodka. Top Up TV should have been the Coke, and maybe one or two PPV services like Setanta and TVX the ice. But TUTV tried putting too much coke in, and the glass overflowed, so the drink wasn't enjoyable. Maybe if TUTV had offered 4, not 10, channels as a top up, for a lower price of a fiver a month, which didnt rely on time-sharing and/or demoting Freeview channels to short slots, then they would have been able to keep the bar open for longer. Offering Disovery, UK Gold, Cartoon Network and TCM/Eurosport on 4 24 hour streams COULD and maybe would have worked.

Now however they're trying to keep you coming to the bar, when you know full well you've never had a decent Vodka and Coke there. Last orders, anyone?


(PS I'm a cider drinker)

Its a common marketing trick to make it look far better value than it actually is. To say you get 15 channels on the paraphernalia for £7.99 a month looks very good from across the shop floor but the small text, which you can't read until you're right on top of it, states they all timeshare with each other, none are 24hrs and none (apart from Red Hot, a separate payment anyway) aired after midnight as that went to Teachers TV. In the most extreme case, one channel only aired for eight hours a week across two days.



Doubtful, as it would have meant more timesharing amongst the existing channels. Of the old service, only three ran for twelve consecutive hours - UKTV Gold, Discovery and Cartoon Network, TCM ran for ten hours, as did Eurosport. To add anything else would have reduced the timing of these services.



Sky Sports 1 is a bad example to use because its a channel that drives a lot of customers to its platform. Like Sky One, there's more chance of winning the lottery than seeing Sky Sports on Freeview under any circumstances.

Sky+ has been featured on Watchdog, so think twice if your ever going to get one.

Thanks for all the extremely interesting, albeit negative, comments about my original question. While in an ideal world, In would love to be able to pay £40 plus per month on Sky+, I need permission from my landlord and they are not granting! cable is not operational where I live and to purchase a recordable freeview box would cost me £120.00 plus anyway. TopUpTv is to me, a good substitute. You still get UKTVGold and TCM and Discovery airing in the evenings. I work during the day so don't see it as a problem not to have these channels during the day.

Some people are unable to enjoy the luxuries of Sky and Cable but still want a little bit more. It seems ironic that channels such as Disney and Nickleodeon are keen to participate in the TopUp Anytime setup and other channels are looking to come on board in the future. My original question was :Has anyone else experienced the same difficulties with their boxes as I did? Upgrades are due in early January.

Sky+ needn't cost "£40+" - I pay for 4 of the six mixes and the Sky+ subscription, which costs £28. Though to be honest a decent Freeview PVR would probably cover pretty much everything I record.

In the long term BT Vision should be a better bet - but it's early days yet so I'd let other people have the problems and consider jumping on board once they are sorted.


Top Up TV is like chocolate in many ways - the price doesn't fall, but gradually you get less for your money in the same way as those chunks of Dairy Milk have disappeared over the years!

It's not a bad idea (it is said though it is the BBC's idea and they are launching their free version, on trial at least, next year). The main thing that killed them was Five taking two streams for their digital channels. Setanta will take even more space from them next year.

But the general idea of using little watched space overnight to record programmes and create what I think they call a Push VOD service isn't too bad - but the content lets them down.


Just like the main service they've tried to squeeze too much in meaning you get a couple of hours of programmes from 20 odd channels a week (low quality programming at that, very little of say Living's flagship shows).

If they were more selective and cut the number of channels to around 6-8, but increase the content from each I think they'd have a much better service.


Basically though I can't see it surviving - neither the Anytime element or the cut down traditional Top Up TV channels could survive on their own, and with TUTV cut to less than two streams they've got little chance together.

Frankly, more money is to be made sub-letting their space to Freeview content providers!

I agree with Cwathen, TUTV Anytime is doomed to failure. Surely a DTT box with a built-in PVR is a much better option.

I've said since the start that TUTV could not work. I haven't changed my mind, though am surprised it's lasted as long as it has. It's current proposition is too complicated for the average consumer, and from reading some of the problems people are having (on Digital Spy) I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. The software in the box appears to be full of bugs and even when it does download something properly you may well find the programme has been badly recorded off air and has a bit of the beginning or end missing!

I don't own any of these boxes so I don't really know what the ins and outs are, but aren't these DVRs (I hate the term PVR with a passion) simply 21st century versions of the video recorder?

I.e. if you have set the recorder to record from, say 12:00 to 12:30 it will record that time and not over, so if the broadcaster has shifted the programme 2 minutes forward because they are running late, the end 2 minutes will get cut off?

Or am I missing something here?

You're missing the point. Top Up TV now have a service where they download a selection of programmes to the box. They're recording those programmes off-air to send out as files and I've read some reports which suggest that some of the programmes that have been sent out this way have been incomplete.