Forums Forums Enthusiast Forums A - Z Gadgets & Tech BT Vision Has Finally Arrived

For those of you with freeview, but wanting a PVR the quality of Sky+ and access to on-demand sports, movies, music video's and television programs, the answer could well be here... BT Vision.

I have been following BT's development of this service closely for probably around a year now and I must say it looks impressive and is certainly the next stage after Homechoice for IPTV services.

It should be near-nationwide available and is completely free as standard (excluding a £90 one time connection and installation charge).

The only bummer is you are required to have BT Total Broadband to use the service at present, which isnt actually all that bad especially if you plan on using Wifi on a laptop at any time.

They will be showing premiership matches via Setanta Sports next season, as part of the new deal Setanta have managed to screw out of the FA (instead of it being good for fans, its worse as it means 40% of matches will be ppv at maybe £15 a match).

Personally, im too happy with Sky+ and all the channels, but for someone who doesnt need all the channels, but still wants both a PVR and access to extra programming and a very low monthly fee, then is the perfect solution.

Its certainly a strong competitor for Top-up TV imho. Finally we have another intermediate option in the digital television market, pleaced between Freeview/Freesat From Sky and Sky/NTL Telewest.

What are your thoughts on this?

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Sentanta. Don't they have things like international tiddlywinks, etc? A really lame channel.

Setanta are a primarily Irish broadcaster. This sports division Setanta Sports though are quite a big channel in Scotland due to them gaining the license to show a number of Scottish premier division matches a few years ago.

During the last round of Premiership dealings, Sky were told they were no longer allowed to have rights to all the Premiership games. Basically, this was to enable a PSB like the BBC or ITV to gain rights.

But along came Setanta with their money and bought the remaining rights, so they will be showing i think 46 matches next season. The question atm is though, whether they will show them on their PPV channel or on their mainstream channel. Originally it was supposed to be on their PPV channel, which means they would be charging around £15 a match as they do for other events, but I think they might be slowly and surely realising that people won't pay for this and it will lose them a LOT of money, so they may end up their subscription channels instead, which whilst better, means a raw deal for the fans at the end of the day.

I'd prefer to stick to freeview. Basically cas it's free, and theres no better price than that.

Perhaps if I were an avid football fan (or was interested in it AT ALL) then yeah, I might be persuaded, but I wouldn't pay £15 a match.

Any idea how it works Matty? Just like another set top box? Is there a card needed like top-up TV for PPV?

Its IPTV with Freeview, so there will be some sort of hardware CAM in the box which presumably will decrypt the PPV and on-demand content.

The freeview part of the box will work as any other, but the on-demand content will work via the broadband max network. I would assume it houses an MPEG4 decoder as I can't see them using MPEG2 for it like they do for digital television services.

The PVR will work with both the Freeview and on-demand content. Am unsure if its twin tuner for the Freeview, but if it is, then the £90 imho is worth it for the PVR.

BT have been developing this service since late 2002 from what I can remember, so it should be a very good interface (unlike many Freeview boxes and the pathetic Liberation crap that NTL Telewest use) and should be very stable and fast.

But this will only be proven when I see it for real.

I know BT have been working very hard over the last year or so to secure content deals with major channels, film studios and programme production companies.

It will be interesting to see how it works. Im can't say for sure, but I don't think the CAM on the box will work with the DTV decoder, so no chance of TUTV on it, but i may "just" be wrong.