Eir vs Vodafone FTTH - but what is the TV offering like?

irlrobins

FTTH is now available in my area with Eir and Vodafone offering up to 2Gb. I think the broadband service is the same for both, but one thing I’m less certain of is their TV offering. We don’t watch much TV but wife likes to record some series like Bake Off, Masterchef, etc so will be adding basic TV package to the bundle

Anyone have experience of either TV service and can share how good the recording and playback functionality is? Any limitations on what channels you can record? Can you series link? How long do recordings last, etc?

Thanks

r

babelfish1990

I use Eir TV. On the positive side, the Apple 4K TV box is an excellent piece of kit, and it is really convenient to be able to run all your apps (Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Prime, RTE player etc) on the same box including normal TV channels from the Eir TV app. The Apple TV box is a proper next gen platform with cloud recording vs most of the other TV platforms who still use mechanical disk drives and clunky user-interfaces. It also works very well over WiFi, so no need to wire every room with Ethernet. Eir also sell additional boxes (refurbished for €79.99 or new), so you can do multi-room with no additional monthly fees. Eir charge €9.99pm for first TV box with their basic set of channels, which is a very competitive price vs the other providers. The cloud recording means that you can play back on any player in multi-room, and the boxes pick up where you left off playing on a different box.

On the negative.side, recording can be a little messy. This is probably due to some copyright restrictions related to cloud recording, rather than any technical limitations of the Apple or Eir products. The UK channels are generally fine. Series linking is not an issue. I am not aware of any limitation on the length of time you can keep the recordings. The Irish channels are not so straightforward. RTE doesn't allow any recordings. However RTE player runs on the Apple box, so it is easy to pick up RTE content on the player. Since BBC i-Player is not officially available in Ireland, it is much more important to have BBC recording. Eir also offer a "Catch-up" service, which is a means of playing back content from the programme guide without recording. However, this is not available for all programmes, and tends to be available for home-produced content. Overall, I think the advantages of the Eir box outweigh the limitations of recording. It is also likely that the other providers will experience the same restrictions on recording when they migrate to next gen boxes with cloud recording.

I haven't used the Vodafone TV service. My understanding is that it is more of a legacy platform compared to Eir (comparable to the old Eir Vision box), using multi-cast TV instead of IP-TV and local mechanical disk recording. I don't think it works over WiFi, so you would need to run Ethernet cables to each TV.

irlrobins

Thanks for the detailed response. The lack of recording on RTE isn’t a big issue, rare we’d watch or record anything on RTE, and RTE player is a workaround.

Xithus

Vodafone's TV service is utter rubbish. It has the same issues mentioned above with randomly channels not allowing recording etc but in addition to that the TV boxes are old, slow and the picture quality (1080i) is woeful. Just go with Eir. I can't comment on their TV app but at least you'll have what most people consider to be the most capable smart device connected to your TV for the rest of the streaming apps. Even if you're not an Apple fan.