I was delighted to see the launch of DishTV in Oct 2003 and immediately bought it by throwing Rs. 6000 down the drain . After that I have been waiting for the Sony & Star’s bouquet. May be not their fault, it’s my fault for choosing the Zee’s Dish TV.
I have seen the DirecTV in US since a long time and so I was impressed with the quality of the service. I expected there might be some deterioration in service, which would improve with time. But to my surprise Zee can just screw up anything, they are horrible in services. They upgraded the firmware of the set-top box to further deteriorate the service. Read the cons for details.
Pros:
All the channels are clear with no snow. (That’s there major drawback)
Multilingual channels Cartoon (Hin & Eng), Euro News (in 7 European Language). One can on the fly change the audio stream.
Electronic Program Guide: For almost all the channels it provides schedule of programs upto 48 hours (aprox). Also you can set reminders, my set top box gives 20 programs. One can schedule it for months repeatedly or for once. But there is some flaw in the software, even if there are no overlapping time it gives error ’’Timer Overlaps’’. A nice feature overall, so that you don’t miss your favourite car show or important news article.
Cons:
They advertise DVD quality pictures but their transmission is not even close to a decent VCD. They are fooling the public, digital doesn’t mean DVD necessarily. Their digitization of the AV signal is very poor. The transmission quality of signals is better on the cable (barring the snow on the cable). Good quality signal doesn’t only mean signal without snow/grains, since there is only 1 meter of the cable length on which the analog signal is passed to TV hence there are no snow. Whenever there is some fast motion picture there would be frame loss or even worse one can see the pixelation. This varies from channel to channel though. Some channels are as bad as the Dish TV Logo you see on the left of the review.
They are charging Rs. 300 plus taxes per month to show just the Zee bouquet of channels. Which is pretty high, (by just paying Rs. 200-400 for cable you got to get all the channels). Imagine no Discovery, NGC, History or Hallmark from Star and Sony group of channels. One always asks what one can watch on DishTV then. I would advice people to wait till the transmission rights issue is resolved from the government.
Channel numbers are highly disorganized: The original software of the STB (SetTopBox) allowed the channel to be assigned to any channel number, as you can do on TV. They started serially from 1-40, but once they increased their channel numbers. They started assigning numbers arbitrarily like 100, 102, 112, 403, 1012 etc. Plus they modified the software of STB such that you cannot re-assign the channel numbers. You can’t guess the logic of the sparse channel number. On top of it they would jump the programs from here and there. They are not clear as what to place where. It’s almost 2 years since they launched and they can’t decide which channel to place where? This shows their immaturity in this field.
Software Upgrades (Shows their immaturity):
a. When you switch off the STB it would always comes on in channel 999 (Dish Interactive). This channel mostly contains the stupid Zee’s ad and it’s not interactive at all. They don’t know the definition of what interactive is. If you need any information regarding the Dish TV, wait for at least half an hour for the program to rotate. If power goes for a 2 sec, you would loose the channel you were watching. The original software use to store the channel number on the flash and even after the power failure, the STB use to come back on the same channel.
b. Inter-digit delay 5 Secs(when using remote to change channels): Press the 3 digits (at least) of any channels and then wait for 5 secs, then further wait for 2-5 secs to switch to the channel requested. This is really very irritating if you are trying to surf the TV.
c. Card Number Display: To put a check on broadcast from the STB for commercial purposes by the cable operators, the STB intermittently display the card number on the screen (this identifies your subscription number) randomly at random location. Now what they have done is that the display of the number is more frequent and it would display on the text when you are watching news over the name of the person. The original software allowed to remove this text if you pressed the quit/exit button on the remote, but now they have disabled this and its very irritating when you can’t watch the text. The time of display should be just 2-5 seconds but it continues to display for over 15secs, and with repeat display of 3-5 secs.
- Customer Care:
I have reported the above problem many times they coolly note down the complain give a complaint number and just throw it in the dustbin. I even called up their senior management they assured me that they would definitely do something about it and call me back in 48 hours. No calls from them even after a week.
So my advice would be not to take the subscription from Dish TV they are highly immature and don’t understand what is the right way to transmit digital quality signals. They are smart enough to screw the best things in the technology.
Wait for the Star/Tata as they are experienced and would definitely outperform the India’s so called first Direct To Home services.
If you want to have the DTH go for the DDs DTH at least you won’t have to pay for the subscription charges and 30 of the channels being displayed Dish are robbed from DD. You would get all the Free to Air channels most of the commercial news channels including BBC, Headlines Today etc.
P A T H E T I C