Friday, November 12, 2004

Ever since I brought the house I've had cable TV through NTL; originally it was old-school analogue and now it's all high-tech and digital. The trouble is, NTL's cable TV is so unreliable. Nine times out of ten the on-screen TV guide fails to tell you anything about the programmes coming up except that "No details are available"; Most of the time the programme reminders don't bother to actually remind you when the show you wanted to watch comes on; Several times each night the picture goes off for a few seconds; and its best feature: the interactive red button.

The interactive red button on Sky and Telewest brings a whole new world of entertainment to your fingertips, meanwhile in the wonderful world of NTL the red button gives you so much more of an interactive experience. Mainly because if you're actually brave enough to press it your cable box will hang for about an hour and then you'll have to (interactively) get off the sofa, (interactively) walk over to the cable box and then (interactively) pull out the power cord so that the box will reboot. You don't get more interactive than that.

The last straw was coming home to find that the cable box had decided to crash and wouldn't start back up. I phoned NTL only to be told that it would be more than a week before they could send an engineer to weave his magic and (probably) replace the box with (yet another) new one. As it turned out the box finally managed to reboot itself after five hours or so but by then the damage had already been done.

I've given up on NTL and signed up with the Microsoft of the TV world, Sky. One of their engineers is coming next week to stick a small tea tray onto the back of the house and install a nice and shiny Sky Plus box in the living room. Mmmmmm Sky Plus... Sky's very own version of the TiVo system. No more missed programmes ever again plus the ability to pause live TV shows. Hopefully it'll also let you know what's on the TV too.

Posted by Antz at 11:43 PM | Permalink | | |

Previous Posts