Wednesday 11 September 2013

Unboxing Broadband, part 2: more TV, Now!


New broadband, new TV too. NowTV from Sky shows how to do TV 2.0 correctly. But sorry Sky, you’re too expensive. blog.mindrocketnow.com

Last month, I wrote that I thought NowTV from Sky was the closest to answering what was wrong with TV, the fact that TV industry are more focused on tech than programmes. My first impressions of NowTV in the flesh are very positive, that it is close to being the answer due to the ease of use and availability of content. However, it's weak point is the price of content.

The reason I decided to put my money where my blog was, was because of the cost. The box itself costs £10, and there's an offer for the first 6 months of Sky Movies for £15. So for £25, the price of a good-quality HDMI cable, I get a free streaming box and free movies to cover the Christmas period. Cancel the Lovefilm, away we go!

The purchase process was very smooth, completely zero touch, and the only human intervention was needing to be in when the STB was delivered by Royal Mail. Logistics to the home still isn't up to the standard of personalisation and convenience that we are now used to through e-commerce.

The other thing I noticed about the purchase process was that the design is consistent from advertising, to web site, to emails, to packaging, to industrial design and through to the UI. This coherence is very pleasing, and makes the product desirable, rather than simply a means to the end of getting more TV.

Another note on the packaging: I was pleased to see extensive use of recyclable materials, mostly cardboard. I also read that the box draws 1W of power, probably less than my TV on standby. All consumer goods should be mindful of their environmental impact over their entire lifecycle, from manufacture, in use, and to disposal. Technology shouldn't cost the earth.

First boot was very easy. The language of the instruction booklet looked friendly and clear, but of course I didn't use it. I needed a login, which was my SkyID, which I couldn't remember, which necessitated my first trip to the web site. The UI directed me to first update the software, then allowed me to have a look around. By default, NowTV, iPlayer and Demand 5 apps are loaded. The Roku channel is also available, through which you can enable other Internet TV channels - I downloaded CNET, TED and TWiT.

The second trip to the computer was to find out how to program my über remote control to talk to the NowTV box. There were a couple of posts, one on the NowTV forums and one on the Logitech forums, which when put together provided the answer. This also illustrates another way that the NowTV services excels; by providing on-demand support on a friendly and well-moderated forum.

So then some testing. This is the first time that the NowTV box wasn’t superlative. HD from BBC iPlayer looked a little worse than via my older but upgraded Humax HD-Fox T2, and I haven't found Dolby Digital yet. Because I was doing A/B testing, I assume the difference in quality wasn’t because of the particular ABR profile being streamed. Besides, that’s the whole point of a big fat broadband pipe. I read that Sky Movies will be output in 720p, so I look forward to seeing if Sky's own content fares better.

Finally, to a significant difference in philosophy between the NowTV box and other similar products like Apple TV: Sky hasn’t hobbled the box to prevent hacking community upgrades. There’s enough of a technical barrier to make it unattractive to novices, but those with a small amount of savvy can add beta software quite easily. This is because the NowTV box is only a cosmetically changed Roku LT box, and does everything that that £60 STB with a happy hacking community does. Which makes it an even bigger bargain. I’m looking forward to doing some hacking upgrading shortly.

To conclude then: NowTV is easy to purchase, easy to install, easy to watch content, great choice of content, and it's easy to upgrade. Judgement is reserved on picture and sound quality.

However I shan't be keeping it. You see, once the honeymoon is over after the initial 9 months, subscription goes up to £15 per month. We'll then go back to Lovefilm, which for £10 per month, will stream HD movies, and give us a couple of blu-rays to watch at home for that cinema experience. Sorry Sky, you're too expensive.


More in this series: part 1, part 3.

Tuesday 10 September 2013

Unboxing Broadband, part 1: Changing Partners


I've changed broadband! Sky and BT did a great job of getting the service to work. But that's not the same as getting the service to work well. blog.mindrocketnow.com

I decided to change broadband provider last week. We weren't bundling, a cardinal sin for a consumer, so I found that we were paying more for communications services than we needed to. Then I found online shopping deals that made up-selling myself to super-duper fibre broadband even cheaper than our current outlay. No brainer!

I first wanted BT broadband because I wanted BT Sport, to watch the Spurs games for "free". But my wife vetoed that, so I concentrated on finding the best deal. Sky won that RFP, so we set the date for our seamless digital divorce and remarriage to the new paramour.

The process still required a visit from BT. I needed a new faceplate, a data cable laid, finding the green cabinet, and then testing the line, powering up and checking the zero-touch provisioning of the BT VDSL modem, then plugging in and powering up the Sky router, which itself needed to self-provision.

All in all, it took a little shy of 3 hours to do the work. And it was all put in jeopardy because I didn't hear the engineer arrive because the doorbell battery has needed replacing for the last five years. Sometimes it’s the simplest things that can cause technology fail.

The difference due to the new service is noticeable, which surprised me. After all, if you only need 6Mbps to stream video, surely the normal 10Mbps service should suffice? But now there's a snap to loading websites, so long as the computer is concentrating on the task. There's no dreaded clock face wait interrupting watching video. Lovefilm titles finally play at 1080p with no buffering every few minutes. But the beach ball hasn't disappeared off the field of play in all cases.

When the computer is doing many things at once, there's sometimes a lag before the web page loads. Perhaps a stutter on the ticker stream at the bottom of the screen, or in the screen wipe to the next cmd-tab. Certainly, a lot less frequent and noticeable than before.

But some web sites still cause a pause. All the steps in each transaction becomes more obvious: fetching personalised content, forced refresh of the site to show personalised content, requesting the DRM license, sending transaction detail records to CRM, initialising playback. It seems that in most cases, the bottleneck has simply moved elsewhere.

And then there's the problem of my in-home network. Getting the combination of wifi and power line working is actually simple enough. However, optimising so that the broadband torrent that we pay for doesn't turn into a trickle by the time it gets to the computer, is still quite laborious.

The Sky wifi router seems a lot better than the previous Apple Time Capsule, so that has the honour of being the primary wifi router, with the TC relegated to covering the not-spot (annoyingly, my side of the bed). However, it still needs to be sited carefully, up high, presumably where my wife will complain about trailing cables.

Then the power line routers needed to be re-set because they annoyingly chose to corrupt their network ID with all the switching on and off. And the Drobo still can't be seen, first because of double NAT, then because the ethernet plug popped itself out of the hub. Fixed with a satisfying click.

Sky and BT Openreach have done a great job of getting the service to work, and transitioning the service from one provider to the next with minimal interruption. However, that's not the same as getting the service to work optimally, and that is a whole different world of pain.

The challenge that the industry faces is that consumers are becoming more sophisticated with their desires of these services. If the broadband service is marketed as enabling crisp HD video over the internet, and I pay the premium to get the broadband service, then I want crisp HD video. No matter who provides my other kit that actually caused the problem, it's the company that takes my money every month that will get the blame.


More in this series: part 2.

Tuesday 3 September 2013

Is it wrong that I still love my Blackberry? Shame it belongs in a museum.


Nostalgia doesn’t make for good technology business sense, as Blackberry exemplifies. blog.mindrocketnow.com

I recently had a minidisc player fitted into our car. I think this illustrates two points: that I love old technology because of the nostalgia it evokes, and that old technology can still fulfil its original purpose even though it may have been rendered obsolete. It’s entirely incidental that minidiscs are actually quite well suited to use in cars, because they’re much smaller than CDs so you can fit more into your glove compartment. (Especially since my car is an ickle Rover Mini, and therefore has a commensurately ickle glove compartment.)

The same is true for my Blackberry. It’s entirely incidental to me that the keyboard makes it better suited to tapping out emails than any touch-screen haptic effort. I have a sense of nostalgia every time I use it, because it was once cool. And it is still pretty good at making calls and reading emails (and frustratingly rubbish at browsing, viewing media, or indeed anything “smart”). However, its zeitgeist has moved on, its influence has waned, and it’s now the province of enthusiasts – a death knell for any technology.

By all accounts, the new BBOS 10 is actually quite good. Unfortunately, that’s beside the point now. Despite its best efforts, Blackberry was successful by being fashionable, and fashion is ruthless in dumping past paramours for newer models, as this week’s news on Q10 sales bear out. (Just as well my darling wife didn’t marry me for my keen tech fashion sense.)