Is It Me or IS TOPUPTV Anytime Rubbish?

Watchdog has been a little unfair as they automatically put it down to dodgy boxes, where in fact most of the time the box is fine, it's just the dish or some other cabling that is not. Fair enough, the Amstrad PVR3's were useless, but as I understand it they are now out of circulation, with all new installations being the much more reliable Thomson or Pace PVR3's. Also, most people leave the boxes on overnight, which means the HD is spinning 24/7, so it will degrade quicker than a PC. Unlike normal Digiboxes (where the habit of leaving them on overnight has come from) putting it onto standby does not just cut off output to the tv, but also turns off the HD (provided it's not in use).

Ah right I see. *eats humble pie*.

You are exactly right - they have gone a backward step and PDC seems to have been forgotten.

Marksi - don't think programmes are sent as files at all, they are just encrypted broadcasts as far as I understand with the PVR/DVR/DTR recording them in exactly the same way as they'd record a programme you selected.

Spot on, hence why we have TopUp Anytime 1,2 and 3 on DTT, if you take a look at the EPG you can see what's on offer and most night's it usually looks rather crap, especially PictureBox which for an average 1 and a half hour film gets a 3-4 hour slot.

The only small mercy is they haven't given a slot on the EPG to each and every "channel" in the Anytime line up.

Still don't understand in the EPG though when they cleared out the closed channels that Discovery Real Time moved to the back of the EPG at 42 - were they planning to close that too?


The only way TUTV could work in the long term is if they had their own Mux so their future was secured.

It's ridiculous that OFCOM aren't releasing some of the space from the sale of analogue spectrum to just give Freeview and DTT that little bit extra they need to become real competitive - a seventh mux should be given to C4 so ITV and C4 are on more of a level footing with the BBC, with an eighth put up for auction - and ideal for TUTV to secure their future.

The truth is though now I see very little future for them!

In that case it's even worse than I thought.

Surely a much better plan would have been to transmit the programmes as mp4 files and had a suitable decoder in the PVR? Better compression would have allowed faster than real time transfer and therefore a greater selection of programmes.

If it's a service that reaches the summer I'll be surprised.

I think they've done this for a reason, as it looks like a majority of Freeview boxes don't like (or don't support) having more than 90 channels in the memory on the firmware they're being shipped with. We're now up to 94 "channels". My box likes showing me 94 channels until you switch it off, then four of them randomly disappear when you bring it out of standby.

If every Topup "channel" had its own EPG slot, we'd be on 110 channels and no end of complaints I reckon.



I dare say this was planned to close as they still had Discovery at that point. Unless its a fixed part of the legacy Topup TV service, as it doesn't seem to show anything of any great interest, I'm surprised UKTV Food was dropped instead of this.



Problem they've got is, there's going to be no more Mux's.
Other problem they've got is, if Five decide they want to launch more channels (which they may well do, considering C4 have four channels and three timeshifts, ITV have six channels and two timeshifts and the BBC have eight channels) and want to show them on Freeview, Topup TV Anytime is dead there and then.



Yes but by the time analogue spectrum has been shut off and sold, TUTV will probably be dead anyway.