First of all I would like to tell you about my interests.
I am addicted to Football. And I like to watch Foreign language channels. Got a very good patience eventhough the language can be very difficult to understand. So I love to watch German, French channels. ( I own DishTV at my house at Bangalore, and TATAsky at my home place. so I can tell you about both. Please check my review on Tatasky also in the same site).
I watch maximum 25 channels. All other channels are utter waste for me. And I am sure most of the people watch almost onl these many number of channels only. So I dont care whether they provide 100 channels or 1000 channels. Those I am interested in must be provided all time without interrupt and with good quality. Thats all I am looking for.
The very reason I chose DishTV is because Worldcup footbal 2006. I took the connection in May last week. So I could watch all the matches in good quality without any interruption.
Secondly DishTV has got some unique channels which are not available eithe in Local cable nor Tatasky. They are MGM -an english movie channel. Much better than the junk Star movies or HBO, DW-TV- the German national channel, one of the best channels I have ever seen. Its content and broadcasting quality are exceptional. And they broadcast alternatively in English and German every hour. Watching this channel is 1000 times better than wasting my time with some stupid Indian and Foregn (with Desi touch) news channels like CNN-IBN, NDTV, BBC, CNN etc). Its truely a German stuff.
And a French channel called TV5 Monde. Full french language but let me tell you some french movies with English subtitles, so good. I love them. ( I am telling all these to those who are serious in TV watching). Not for confused Indian ordinary viewer. Unfortunately, this channel is off air from today 21 September. These people are losing the battle. And today 6October I came to know one more great news from them. TV5Monde becomes paid channel and you know what is the rate per month? Just Rs150. God save the french men. So this is the beginning of the end. When I took the connection there was another European channel called EuroNews. That was a very good one feeding 7 European languages at a time. But without any communications, one fine day they cut it off.
Dish TV got a lot of serious problems. I am putting one by one below.
1. Hardware: Quality of installation is very poor. The guys are not so professional. He didnt have a signal meter to check it. Had a portable TV instead.
The build quality of the dish is very bad. The two supports for the dish got rust within two months. The quality of the STB and the dish, installation are so good in TATAsky.
There is no PC output, or Component output with the Old STB. recently they started giving VGA but Component output still missing.
2. Software: A lot of bugs in software.
a. Programme alert is not persistent. If you set an alert for a programme, and in between you turn off the STB, or power cut, then when you turn it ON, your allerts are gone and you need to do it again. This is bullshit. When I took the connection, the software was of older version and the allert setting was persistent. Dont know who stupid guy decided to change in this way.
b. No information available. ONe major advantage of DTH broadcasting is the information you are getting with each channel about the programmes. But in DisTV, majority of the channel information are missing and it will show ’Not Available’ most of the time. Sometimes these information will be out of date. And not in synch with the programmes.
c. Favourite settings. Earlier version of the software allowed to rename the Favourites. This was a very useful facility. But new version prohibits this also. Great improvement. One advantage here over Tatasky is you can add as many channel in a Favourite.
d. Channel reset when power off. If you are watching a channel and switch off the STB, then it starts again with DishTV customer care channel again. You need to go to your favourite again . This also must have to be changed.
e. Kids stuff: Games are not so great. If you are planning to spoil your Kid’s eyes and health, then go to Tatasky. The kids stuff and games are very good over there.
f. Browsing thru channels is okey. And compared to Tatasky, the initial setup is faster I feel.
g. No categories. Channels are not categorised well as in Tatasky. The user need to select and add into their favourites. This is not a major issue.
h. Picture quality: Picuture quality in many channels are very bad. Worst than in CAble. Some channels I want to mention here is NatGeo, Discovery, Asianet, etc. There are pixelisation problem with the channels. These non-sense guys are giving a bad quality picture spoiling the name of DTH. Tatasky is better here.
i. Sound, language selection is not existing with some channels. Sometimes it works. No othe issues with sound.
j. There is no user account information available. Recently they added a menu item but it shows 00000 for me. Ridiculous. Tatasky is perfect here.
k. Active services are not so attractive. Only some advertising gimmicks.
3. Customer care: And about the so called cusotmer ’CARE’, really speaking there is no care. Only swallowing customer’s money. I heard these guys are the owner of PLAY WIN lottery. And these guys think DishTV customers are same as somebody who bought their lottery and waiting for their fortune to strike. The stupids sitting at NOida customer care centre dont know what is really going on in this world. Thy speak Hindi and Hinglish, and speak stupid things most of the time. Anyway when you are calling them keep the VC number handy.
(See tatasky customer care , its really great)
Bottom line is if you dont want to see the channels I have mentioned (MGM, TV5 monde and DW tv), forget DishTV. I cant go for Tatasky untill they provide these channel, or DishTV stops one fine day. I think latter may happen soon.
4. Value for money: Both DTH operators and the Indian Government are cheating the viewers. There is no conditional access system in near future. If they show the guts to implement this, then I am sure 80 percent of the nonsense TV channels will become either free or be closed.
The subscription charges are very costly and so the service charges. If you get installation problem like miss alignment or cable cut or moving the house etc, , get a technician from nearby Electronic or TV shop and fix it. Otherwise you will endup paying RS.150 plus the so called service taxes.