BT app and dead boxes

Stevef_fr8ys

Not sure if this is known, but one of my 372T boxes died recently and I hooked up my spare in its place 

After a couple of weeks I realised I had not paired it to my BTTV app, so went to do so. 

Out of interest before doing so I went to MY TV and it was showing all my recorded, watch list and future recordings that were on the dead box! Not something I was expecting.

Does this show that there is definitely some sort of backup in the cloud and how sometimes users see their scheduled lists reappear after a reset?

Roy

@Stevef_fr8ys

You mean My TV on the BT App? It’s all stored somewhere, from when you were using the box that died, and the App probably doesn’t even know that the box has died, just that it has stopped sending the App updates.

The interesting question, though, is whether the BT App keeps its own record of this stuff, or whether it is stored centrally, once, at YouView Towers, and the BT app reads that?

We know that if there is only one copy, it must be the YouView copy, as you can run the box without the BT App.

We also know, from the above, that the BT App isn’t getting the data from the box on the fly, as the box is dead.

So, separate stores, or one store shared? My hunch is separate stores, but if I were smarter, I could probably figure out a way of testing this 😢

Stevef_fr8ys

@Roy, yes MyTV on the app.

I thought it interesting as I'd have thought it would pull the info from the box once paired. I was expecting the various categories to be blank as the box was no more.

Roy

@Stevef_fr8ys

I’m not sure we are on the same page yet?

You said you looked at MyTV before pairing with the new box? And you saw the old info? That’s what I’d expect.

Did you think that the app would try to access the dead box for any updates? It probably did. Or maybe it tried to read a YouView resource, which would still be there also.

Did you think that if the BT app couldn’t reach the box, it would drop all its data about it? But, for all it knows, your box is only temporarily unavailable, so it shouldn’t drop the data just because it can’t update it.

When you paired the app with the new box though, then it could drop the data about the earlier box, and/or drop any link to any data about it that YouView hold. Or if you just Unpair; I think you have to unpair before you can pair with another box anyway.

So any one instantiation of the BT App only has to retain, or link to, data about one YouView box. So BT holds, or links to, one set of data each for as many copies of the BT app as are paired with YouView boxes, past and present. 

And that data will be presented to that copy of the App if it is opened, no matter what the state of the actual box, if the App can’t find it and update from it.

YouView though, I imagine, must hold data for every YouView box there ever was…

Stevef_fr8ys

@Roy, yes I had expected it to be blank as the box was offline, and also that I had managed to factory reset to the point that it had pulled the latest software through but on restart would go no further. 

And yes I did have to unpair first then pair to the new box.

Roy

@Stevef_fr8ys

You didn’t mention the Factory Reset 😢

Certainly, if that had completed, and any delay before the BT App polled your box, or maybe a YouView server, had elapsed, then yes, I’d expect the BT App to have blank details.

But it sounds like the Factory Reset never completed, so nobody woke the BT App with this news 😛

Stevef_fr8ys

My bad @Roy.