I read a review of Tata Sky TV which prompted me to peek at Zee’s Dish TV offering. I must admit that I have been lagging behind in using or atleast testing these two services. I was kind of lost thinking that IPTV is the way to go. But lets have a closer look. Dish TV services, both by Tata and Zee are not bad at all. Their picture quality is better than our local cable provider but not the DVD quality which they claim. Sound is as good as played on an original track CD. The choice of channels is directly proportional to the depth of your pocket :-) On an average the service costs Rs300/month.
I am beginning to doubt about how IPTV can be offered at a price of just Rs300/Month. Airtel-Broadband’s DSL in Karantaka costs Rs250 for downloading 400MB of data. If you want the same quality of Audio and Video as that of Dish TV, I atleast want a speed of 512KBPs(with all complex compression techniques), 1MBPS recommended. Current bandwidth costs for 1MBPs line are way too high. Also, you cannot force a customer to opt for high speed expensive broadband and then push him into the bouqet of IPTV. I had requested the results of Bharti-Airtel’s pilot project on IPTV in Delhi and the request just got passed from one to another without reciving any response. This makes me wonder if the results were awful to be published ? Traditional and Dish TV is very popular amongst Indians while IPTV may not see the same demand. Dish TV with a DVR will also let you view movies on demand, play games, record a TV serial in background while your kid watches a cricket match and will definitely be cheaper than IPTV. Maybe this is the reason why Reliance is silent on its Dish or IPTV plans and in the next few months we will know if Mittal has his midas touch on Airtel’s Triple Play :-)
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It took 15 days and numerous phone calls to the shopkeeper, service center, Zee head office, n number of sales people, technicians to get them to come over to my home and install the DISH TV antennae. DISH TV phone helpdesk standard response was that they don't handle setups and I should talk to the dealer. Dealer said talk to service center. Service center said they're sending the guy and never sent him.
This was not the end of it..now another week passed before the maxi service got activated. This too after tons of phone calls where I was always told it would be taken care of, but never happened.
Now the BIG shock....I expected good quality Video, somewhere near DVD quality since this being digital n all....No such luck...this is a majorly compressed MPEG2 video feed !! It is worse than VCD quality. Sound is near MONO unless you use headphones. I thought that signal strength maybe causing this, but I had 75-76% signal, which DISH TV tech said was the max he had seen himself. people usually get 60-65%.
Damn !! My cable looked and sounded so much better with full bandwidth, and this DTH looked like small video clip made full screen on my 29 inch TV. I guess it's passable on smaller 21'' screens but looks bad and patchy on a 29''.
My advice...don't go for this DTH hype till they improve their service.
P.S. another thing...they recently did a software upgrade and dumbed down the set top box. now you cannot make any system changes and can't even see the signal strength. The channel surfing has also become a pain..instead of quickly shifting between screenful of channel menu, now I have to scroll through each and every channel to reach the desired channel. Their telephone support says there is no way to go back to the old firmware. They claim this new one is very user friendly. How is it user friendly when the users don't like it?? their active channels are just marketting hype to attract new customers comparing their service with TATA SKY. No one watches their silly active patchwork.
I don't know about TATA SKY but DISH TV will give you that cheap "quantity and no quality" feeling that reliance CDMA phones gave. I don't think TATA SKY would be any different.