IPTV providers

noj505

Hi, (first post)

Can anybody tell me their experiences of the various IPTV providers mentioned on the forums, (Magnet, Smart) or any others that they have come across. I notice they are only offering these in certain areas and was wondering if anyone from these areas could let me know what's it like.

What's the service like in terms of channels, quality of picture, interface/user-friendliness, price, etc...

What are the things that they're missing?

Reading some of the posts I'm a bit confused...

Cheers folks

Mountjoy Mugger

Love to tell you, but I'm under an NDA. Have a read about Smart's current IPTV on their public forum http://support.smarttelecom.ie/forums/index.php (Smartvision)

Smart's website gives a list of their channels, pricing etc.

No info on Magnet here, but again - check out their website ( http://www.magnetentertainment.ie/ ). A mate has Magnet down in Portlaoise and he's very happy with it - he is on FTTH though.

noj505

I see in one of the posts that they are offering, or "will be offering in a few weeks" the following: (not sure as to what year these posts are made??)

Phone / TV integration
VOD
Higher quality streams
Parental control
Zap list
Higher BB

Does anybody have any experience of any of these services??? (that does not have an NDA with them... wink )

bk

noj505 wrote: »

What's the service like in terms of channels, quality of picture, interface/user-friendliness, price, etc...

I'm with SmartVision, the old service, not the new one.

The service is awful.

Bad selection of channels, no Sky, no Discovery/History channels, missing many channels you normally get with NTL/Sky.

Picture Quality is lower then NTL or Sky and often suffers from various problems such as pixelation, out of sync audio and sometimes just crashes (often during big soccer matches).

And it costs more then NTL or Sky.

As for the new service, while the quality is supposed to better, they still offer many less channels then NTL/Sky and yet are €4 more expensive then NTL/Sky/FreeSat.

Honestly I can't understand why anyone who has a choice (I don't) would buy this rubbish service.

noj505

right, but what about those services i've mentioned above. Do you have any experience of them, what are they like????

:eek:

bk

noj505 wrote: »

right, but what about those services i've mentioned above. Do you have any experience of them, what are they like????

:eek:

What are you on about, I just gave you a detailed review of the Smart IPTV service, which I have.

What more are you looking for?

A friend of mine has the Magnet IPTV service, no complaints, but then he doesn't watch much TV and it is only available to people in specific developments serviced my Magnet.

noj505

Sorry, I should have made it more clear, the services in bold.

• Phone / TV integration
• VOD
• Parental control
• Zap list

Do you have any experience of them? Not the level of service that they offer...

bk

From what I've heard only the phone/tv integration is working and all it does is show you the name of the person calling, nothing exciting.

noj505

Mountjoy Mugger wrote: »

Love to tell you, but I'm under an NDA.

I am just wondering, are you under this because you upgraded to a new service or was it the terms of the package that you took up with them in the first place.

I presume that this service is not available to all. I suppose you won't be able to answer any of these Q's anyway....

haha

Mountjoy Mugger

I'm trialling their new IPTV product, and I had to sign an NDA. I can tell you that much.

noj505

I see. Tell me this, the service is fantastic is it??

I'll take a "no response" that it isn't....

only kidding. thanks for the info. wink

watty

IPTV is for fibre / DSL Operators to compete with Cable, Satellite and Terrestrial.

Cable, Satellite and Terrestrial and DVD are for Consumers that want good choice, reliable delivery, any number of TVs/Setboxes, PVRs, Good Quality and true HD.

IPTV struggles to feed more than one setbox and struggles to do HDTV.


The Holy Grail of IPTV was VOD (Video On Demand) of long tail 100,000 Catalogue. But the rights holders havn't co-operated, the server bandwidth & storage is a problem, so most IPTV is a poor copy of cable with mostly an Xtra-Vision type "current releases" of VOD with some cheap or copyright free stuff (€2 in the Pound Shop) chucked in.

The fast channel change systems are not scalable (if everyone changes at same time you run out of server bandwidth).

You really need Fibre to The Home or true high capacity HFC with true 1:1 with packet loss and jitter free delivery. Even then 4 set boxs at HD needs peak of 120Mbps. Trivial for Cable or Satellite.

Solair

Well, it might be handy if you don't watch much TV and they throw the IPTV pack in for free with your broadband.

Otherwise, go with UPC or Sky..

noj505

I suppose that this technology is still in its infancy, so it must improve over time...

Can existing cable operators modify their networks to offer the type of enhanced services that IPTV promises???

bk

noj505 wrote: »

I suppose that this technology is still in its infancy, so it must improve over time...

Can existing cable operators modify their networks to offer the type of enhanced services that IPTV promises???

To be honest noj505, IPTV offers very little enhanced services. In my experience (and I actually have IPTV) it is just inferior to cable and satellite, it offers little or no benefit and many disadvantages.

- Phone / TV integration

Nothing exciting, just displays the name of who is calling on your TV. You can already do this with Windows Media Center or Linux MythTV, with a standard phone line. Also no reason why this can't be done on cable or satellite boxes, just isn't worth the effort.

- Parental control

Already available on cable and satellite boxes, nothing new or dependent on IPTV.

- Zap list

Just a reminder, been on cable and satellite boxes for years, just called something different

- VOD

This is the one and only interesting feature on IPTV. The problem as Watty pointed out is that for the most part, the content providers aren't willing to allow their content to be used with it. Also it is very tricky and expensive to do right.

Note that cable can do VOD, in fact nearly all the VOD deployments in the world are actually on cable. Virgin in the UK do VOD and about three years ago I used VOD on Comcast cable in Boston.

VOD is interesting, but it hasn't turned out to be the money maker that the cable and TV companies were hoping. People are happy to use it when it is free, but they aren't willing to pay extra for it or per show.

Solair

Well, given that cable providers have a big 'data pipe' running into your home. It's possible that they could provide video on demand using IPTV technology for those services, while using normal cable multiplexing for the main channels.

noj505

Isn't fiber supposed to be better than cable, theoretically??? Doesn't cable use fiber in some parts of it's setup?

So if or when they decide to run ftth (*everywhere) will that then send cable to the stone age??

Is see that Magnet will be offering 50mb lines soon (which probably includes phone & tv). Considering that all iptv needs is about 12mb's, to run smoothly, you could have your 2 stb's and still have a fat internet connection. (I know what watty said earlier bout the scalability issue)

As well as that it seems more people prefer to get triple play rather than shop around ( here ) so it seems the action is hotting up between UPC and the rest...

paulm17781

UPC are the only ones who can offer proper triple play. Watty outlined the problems with IPTV and it'll be some time before we see FTTH everywhere, Smart and Magnet do it in a few areas but from what I've heard the Smart service is awful.

I don't know what the max capacity of co-ax against fibre is but I would expect (and could be wrong) that cable cos will use co-ax for longer than telcoms will use copper.

noj505

I'm curious as to what you mean by "proper" triple play.

As well as that, I wonder will the likes of UPC upgrade their cable to fibre at some stage in the future, maybe when it isn't as costly.

IPTV is just a framework for delivering tv over a ip based system.

If the cable option is the best, UPC could do the same as they are doing now with cable, only instead on a fibre wire, leaving no need for amplifiers for signal degradation. Or am I completely missing the point.

(And yes i did mention Watty's post from earlier)

bk

First of all, just to point out that no company in Ireland actually delivers FTTH.

Smart and Magnet have what is called FTTB or FTTC (Fibre to the Building (apartment building) or Fibre to The Curb (estate)). Smart then use a DSLAM and a standard telephone line over CAT5 from the fibre to each apartment, Magnet use ethernet over CAT5 from the fibre to each apartment.

In Smarts case they are limited to 24mb over their ADSL2+ DSLAMs (unless they upgrade their DSLAMS to VDSL2).

There is little or no advantage to a cable company delivering broadcast TV over IPTV, they have plenty of bandwidth for all the channels they have and then they don't need lots of expensive encoding servers. Their simply is no advantage to them.

Interestingly Verizon, who have the second largest residential FTTH network in the world don't actually use IPTV, instead they broadcast all the channels at the same time over the fibre network and have the STB tune into whichever channel it wants, just like how cable and sat work. They do it this way as it is a lot cheaper then IPTV.

BTW UPC network actually is mostly fibre, they only use Co-ax on the last mile from each home to the local node. To give you some idea of the capacity of co-ax, a modern co-ax network will have over 500MHz of bandwidth, now just one 8MHz channel can carry 50mb of data, so that is theoretically over 3GB of capacity on Co-ax.

In time, cable companies may convert to fibre, but they are under far less pressure to do so then the telcos.

BTW why are you so interested in IPTV?

noj505

I am just wondering why there is so much talk about it lately. It's being touted as the next best thing and i wanted to know why.

Thanks for all the info though, it's been very informative. The response from people has been great. I love to pester :pac: people to get a response out of them and most people didn't seem to mind.

paulm17781

noj505 wrote: »

I'm curious as to what you mean by "proper" triple play.

The UPC one is the only one that currently works. The rest are pretty shoddy. Magnet may be an exception to this but they are in less areas than UPC. The Eircom IPTV looked pretty good but I saw it on a small CRT screen, no idea what it would look like on a larger screen.

noj505

No way, where did you see the eircom one???

I heard that they were doing a test alright. Did it seem to have the same problems as the others (screen freezing when changing channels, etc). How many channels?

If the were to come on the scene they'd have a pretty large existing (broadband) customer base to work with...

bk

noj505 wrote: »

I am just wondering why there is so much talk about it lately. It's being touted as the next best thing and i wanted to know why.

Ah fair enough, the reason there is so much hype about it is that the telcos are desperate to get into the TV broadcast market, to increase their margins and to try and stop losing customers to the very successful Triple Play cable based services.

Also the hardware and infrastructure manufacturers are drooling at the mouth at the idea of selling lots of expensive new IPTV gear to the telcos.

To the ordinary person at home there really is very little benefit.

BTW Eircom are currently part of a consortium bidding on the DTT license. Their plan is likely to follow BT's Vision service in the UK. Basically an DTT set top box which also plugs into the Eircom BB to receive extra channels via IPTV and VoD

paulm17781

noj505 wrote: »

No way, where did you see the eircom one???

Some one I know has it. I can't say too much, I don't want to get them in trouble.

noj505 wrote: »

I heard that they were doing a test alright. Did it seem to have the same problems as the others (screen freezing when changing channels, etc). How many channels?

Still slow to change channel, I can't remember how many channels. It looks pretty good though.

noj505 wrote: »

If the were to come on the scene they'd have a pretty large existing (broadband) customer base to work with...

But it (the whole Eircom package) still hasn't a patch on UPC.

daniellewagner

noj505 wrote: »

Hi, (first post)

Can anybody tell me their experiences of the various IPTV providers mentioned on the forums, (Magnet, Smart) or any others that they have come across. I notice they are only offering these in certain areas and was wondering if anyone from these areas could let me know what's it like.

What's the service like in terms of channels, quality of picture, interface/user-friendliness, price, etc...

What are the things that they're missing?

Reading some of the posts I'm a bit confused...

Cheers folks

I purchased this product recently only to find that it does not work at all. I went to great lengths to get a customer service representative on the phone, but they ignored my concerns and refused to help. It may work for some people but I certainly cannot vouch for this product at all.

hooriyakassab

Received my MaaxTV LN4000 Receiver two weeks ago. Delivery is prompt, the device small and compact and it does provide lots and lots of channels. The quality is fairly okay most of the times and re-setting the device helps the other times. However channels are not regular and you cannot expect them to buffer fast. The device is okay at its best but is certainly not meant for the ardent TV viewer.

talentiptv

You need to check first website and channel list . Then you can request for Free trial if them service is good then you can check VOd quality then you can order form them

talentiptv

I think before Order , Must request Free trial once you get your trial then you check them service n quality

icdg

We don't drag up old threads