@Roy just went in they have changed the Now TV offering, it now has all movies type stuff. It did previously give sports but must have been removed - you used to have the 1 day pass, 7 day pass etc....so I guess its only through the Sky Sports option that TT gives you. Apologies I'd didn't go into Now TV to check the latest offerings, I just knew it was still there.
The incorrect information you gave about Now TV on TalkTalk was and is about 3 years out of date. How can or could that be?
Now I’m confused again
Do you mean the incorrect information that fusemunk gave was correct three years ago - that you could redeem a Sports pass on NowTV on a TalkTalk YouView box back then? Or what?
‘Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful’ Wm Morris
@Roy - your vision of what you would like Youview of offer the customer. You have a tremendous amount of knowledge as input - where would you like to see it go?
‘TV companies are looking for the best OS going forward’.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘TV company’.
If you mean TV makers, yes they are all looking for, or think they already have, the best OS.
But is YouView it? Sony have adopted YouView, though it is only an app on the underlying Android TV OS, not an OS in itself. But the YouView on Sony is but a pale shadow of YouView on the boxes, many people can’t wait to get shot of it and go to the ordinary Freeview alternative Sony offers, and the Android OS seems to be universally recognised as a Con on the list of Pros and Cons in reviews of these sets.
If, though, you mean broadcasters, then it’s simply not the case. Broadcasters want their channels on the widest possible choice of devices, so they aim to be platform-agnostic; Freeview, Sky, Virgin, websites, and with their players likewise on a wide range of devices.
Where the consideration with YouView is how easy it it to get your player onto the platform, both technically and commercially, and what is the likely payback?
And you only have to consider that YouTube isn’t on YouView to realise that the barriers to this, whoever is putting them up, is ruling out one of the ‘big four’ non-broadcaster apps being on YouView. Which is screwy.
‘Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful’ Wm Morris
@Roy - your vision of what you would like Youview of offer the customer. You have a tremendous amount of knowledge as input - where would you like to see it go?
In the nicest possible way, I don’t care where it goes
As a retail user, the (re)tail of YouView is being wagged by the big dog of BT, whose wants and needs are not my wants and needs, and so we get the crumbs that fall from the table.
I knew why I bought a YouView box in 2012, and there were a few things I thought could be improved, and at first I thought the BT takeover was preventing any of those things being done, as BT were soaking up all the resources; but I no longer think that.
And there were a few players that I thought could be improved or rounded out, and I had nowhere else to go for them, but that is no longer the case.
Take NowTV, still massively incomplete on YouView; we just watched it on either of our Samsung TVs.
But these don’t do subtitles on NowTV, and NowTV do some series where the sound is incomprehensible, no matter how loud you make it, as was the case with Westworld before it got too silly for us to watch it, and is True Detective now. Some psychoacoustic shaping of the sound, or 5.1 badly mixed back to 2.1 or something. But even that - no trouble, get a couple of NowTV sticks £20 each, get subtitles. (Plus a 3 month entertainment sub in each, so -£4 really).
So we don’t care any more if YouView hasn’t got a certain app, or has only got an old non-4K, non-HDR, Netflix that won’t play Bandersnatch; we just route around it.
And that is how our landscape has changed.
So why stick with YouView? Well, we still use the PVR functions for regular programmes, partly so we can skip ads, partly because there is this annoying and pointless lacuna where if you just miss a programme live, it doesn’t reappear on catchup until a few hours later.
And we still have one TV that doesn’t have an HD tuner but does have an HD screen, that a YouView box can act as the HD tuner for.
But I could get my old Digital Stream PVR out and do both of the above. Perhaps not Pause and Rewind live TV, though.
So what could be the YouView box’s USP going forward, now the backward EPG is no longer it?
The answer is Aggregated Search. We have all these apps and subscription services, but we can never remember what the hell we watched where, or where we have got to in the series, and so on, except by keeping a notebook. (Yes, paper and pen).
YouView has the promise to provide this, if Discovery wasn’t so random, and Watchlist worked a bit better. But of course, it needs to have all the players in order to aggregate, and have them in good enough and recent enough versions that we don’t get an experience inferior to these players on other devices.
And it needs to be cloud-based, not box-specific, so it follows us from YouView box to YouView box, like the state of play on each of our players does. No more ‘you(view) in your small corner and I in mine’.
And of course, I would like to see functionality that we took for granted on OldGen restored to NextGen. Plus some inroads into the outstanding items on Keith’s lists would not be a bad idea.
‘Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful’ Wm Morris
Comments
Apropos of ‘@Roy what’s your vision?’, it’s good in both eyes, thanks
But I have a suspicion you meant something different.
What was that?
Do you mean the incorrect information that fusemunk gave was correct three years ago - that you could redeem a Sports pass on NowTV on a TalkTalk YouView box back then? Or what?
‘TV companies are looking for the best OS going forward’.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘TV company’.
If you mean TV makers, yes they are all looking for, or think they already have, the best OS.
But is YouView it? Sony have adopted YouView, though it is only an app on the underlying Android TV OS, not an OS in itself. But the YouView on Sony is but a pale shadow of YouView on the boxes, many people can’t wait to get shot of it and go to the ordinary Freeview alternative Sony offers, and the Android OS seems to be universally recognised as a Con on the list of Pros and Cons in reviews of these sets.
If, though, you mean broadcasters, then it’s simply not the case. Broadcasters want their channels on the widest possible choice of devices, so they aim to be platform-agnostic; Freeview, Sky, Virgin, websites, and with their players likewise on a wide range of devices.
Where the consideration with YouView is how easy it it to get your player onto the platform, both technically and commercially, and what is the likely payback?
And you only have to consider that YouTube isn’t on YouView to realise that the barriers to this, whoever is putting them up, is ruling out one of the ‘big four’ non-broadcaster apps being on YouView. Which is screwy.
As a retail user, the (re)tail of YouView is being wagged by the big dog of BT, whose wants and needs are not my wants and needs, and so we get the crumbs that fall from the table.
I knew why I bought a YouView box in 2012, and there were a few things I thought could be improved, and at first I thought the BT takeover was preventing any of those things being done, as BT were soaking up all the resources; but I no longer think that.
And there were a few players that I thought could be improved or rounded out, and I had nowhere else to go for them, but that is no longer the case.
Take NowTV, still massively incomplete on YouView; we just watched it on either of our Samsung TVs.
But these don’t do subtitles on NowTV, and NowTV do some series where the sound is incomprehensible, no matter how loud you make it, as was the case with Westworld before it got too silly for us to watch it, and is True Detective now. Some psychoacoustic shaping of the sound, or 5.1 badly mixed back to 2.1 or something. But even that - no trouble, get a couple of NowTV sticks £20 each, get subtitles. (Plus a 3 month entertainment sub in each, so -£4 really).
So we don’t care any more if YouView hasn’t got a certain app, or has only got an old non-4K, non-HDR, Netflix that won’t play Bandersnatch; we just route around it.
And that is how our landscape has changed.
So why stick with YouView? Well, we still use the PVR functions for regular programmes, partly so we can skip ads, partly because there is this annoying and pointless lacuna where if you just miss a programme live, it doesn’t reappear on catchup until a few hours later.
And we still have one TV that doesn’t have an HD tuner but does have an HD screen, that a YouView box can act as the HD tuner for.
But I could get my old Digital Stream PVR out and do both of the above. Perhaps not Pause and Rewind live TV, though.
So what could be the YouView box’s USP going forward, now the backward EPG is no longer it?
The answer is Aggregated Search. We have all these apps and subscription services, but we can never remember what the hell we watched where, or where we have got to in the series, and so on, except by keeping a notebook. (Yes, paper and pen).
YouView has the promise to provide this, if Discovery wasn’t so random, and Watchlist worked a bit better. But of course, it needs to have all the players in order to aggregate, and have them in good enough and recent enough versions that we don’t get an experience inferior to these players on other devices.
And it needs to be cloud-based, not box-specific, so it follows us from YouView box to YouView box, like the state of play on each of our players does. No more ‘you(view) in your small corner and I in mine’.
And of course, I would like to see functionality that we took for granted on OldGen restored to NextGen. Plus some inroads into the outstanding items on Keith’s lists would not be a bad idea.