Tata Sky Plus Review – Its not really Plus I must say - Revolutioners

by Kuldeep IN Tips and Guides | 3 Comments | 2,143 views

Tata Sky Plus Review – Its not really Plus I must say

I recently bought Tata Sky Plus for my home. I don’t have any HD TV so I am using it on my normal 21” color television. Its good so far. Lots of talk with customer care as usual. It’s the part and parcel of buying a service in India. Anyways, I would really not waste your time. I would like to put my opinion forward as a review of Tata Sky Plus from a customer’s perspective.

Picture & Sound Quality

Positive:

I am not sure what to say about quality. I guess its OK. won’t say its awesome. I mean its the same as I used to get on my Local wired cable. Sound quality again, I would say its ok because I did not use any hi-fi audio system with it. I could not check the digital audio, SPDIF as well because I did not have anything to check as I am using my Tata Sky + a 21″ Sony television. I don’t have any HDTV. So really can’t say anything about Picture and audio quality because. It looks fine on my television though.

Negative:

I have heard the signal gets lost whenever its about to rain. I have not experienced it though. But a lot of people have told me about it. So, better watch out for what if you want to have an uninterrupted service. Because the services are down for at least 10 minutes or so before the rain actually starts.

Live Pause Play Feature

Positives:

You can record up to 2 channels simultaneously and watch one of them.
Easy to understand the pause and play functions. Easy to setup recording a program and setup the capture for later purpose.
Record programs even when your Tata Sky Plus is on stand by.
Record even when your Television is turned off.

Negatives:

You can not pause recording, for example if you want to skip ads in your final recording you can not do that. You can pause the channel using live pause and play feature but since Tata Sky Plus keeps recording everything as soon as you start watching the channel its not possible to pause the recording and skip advertisements or any other part that you don’t want to record and reply. So if you are watching the match and recording it at the same time there is no way you can skip ads and leave match only. When you replay the recorded match you will have to watch those advertisements as well. I wish it had an option to remove adverts automatically.
If you click on record on a channel it will start recording the channel from the time you’ve been watching the channel. For example if you have been watching a movie on HBO for the last 2 hours and did not change the channel and you press record button now the recoded program will start from 90 minutes earlier as you have been watching the movie from then. So practically if would not record from the time you push record button, it will actually add 90 minutes before that to your program. This can become kind of messy keeping in mind we don’t have any edit option. So your Tata Sky Plus is going to get bulky day by day and HDD will get filled very early.
Recording is encrypted with your subscription. OK Let me explain that to you. For example if you have recorded a Match today. Obviously you would have subscribed to Sports pack. Now if you unsubscribe the sports pack next month and try to watch the match you recorded, you won’t be able to do so. I spoke with customer service and they said “Sir whenever you want to watch the match again just subscribe to Star Cricket package and you will be able to view the recorded match” WTF ? Why would I want to subscribe to Star Cricket again when I know there is no cricket on that for the next 3 months? Is that what you call Digital Video Recorder? No, they need to do something about it and that too really fast.
No option to rename recorded videos let me explain this by an example. If you happen to record a series then it would show the episode name with 10 entries and you would have to play all of them to get to know which one to play. So no date nothing is mentioned in the recorded list. 45 hours of recording time is too much but Tata Sky Plus simply lacks the management of recorded program. I mean folders and search with rename and edit feature could have been a really boost to this DVR.
Tata Sky Plus has 160 GB of HDD but only 80 GB is used for recording. Rest is used for live pause feature, which according to me is too much because you can only have a buffer of 90 minutes for any channel. As soon as you move to a different channel the old cache gets deleted and Tata Sky Plus starts recording the new channel and keeps the last 90 minutes in buffer. OK, my whole point is that 90 minutes and Tata Sky Plus Operating System could have been managed in max to max 10 GB space. The rest of the space could have been utilized in recording. So basically Tata Sky Plus could house atleast around 70 hours of recording compared to 45 hours now.

Channels

Positives:

I would say none, as I did not find anything useful in terms of channels. There is a whole load of crap though. I mean the Active thing. It’s totally useless. In 10 million subscribers, i think only 10 would be using these.

Negative:

No selection of channels of your choice. Everything is divided in to packages and those packages are so strategically designed that if you want to watch Discovery, BBC News Colors and Star Cricket you will have to subscribe to all the packages because every package contains a good channel that every damn person watches in India. For that, you need to pay a handsome amount of 300-350 Rs which is way beyond what I was paying to my local cable guy.
Your account needs to be active all the time for you to watch any channel even if you don’t have account balance. Not even free to air channels are served when your account is inactive or nil. So you will have to pay at least 125 Rs every month to watch any channel.
You can not add free to air channels. No matter what this is something that I really thought would not be the case. Its one of the basic features a customer would ask for. I mean no body wants to pay to view free to air channels and neither Tata is paying anything to the broadcasters. Why is that a problem with Tata Sky.

Future Proof

Tata Sky Plus seems to be a bit future proof. I mean there are some extra slots available which are not active yet. But soon will be, like Ethernet, USB and modem. It will definitely be useful in coming years.

I saw the secret menu of Tata Sky Plus. There was an option of Remote TV. I am assuming with this feature you could control your STB from internet as well. You may be able to manage your recordings over the internet.

Tata Sky Plus will be able to provide Internet connection through the STB.

Final Verdict

If you are really buying Tata Sky for recording purpose and not just as a DTH then I would recommend you go through this post again. I don’t want you to be disappointed once you buy it. No doubt its the best we can get. There are no other competitors in the market. But we are not far away from those days when this service will be standard from every DTH provider. Just keep that in mind. In any case its value for money. For me the most disappointing things were; recording gets encrypted with your channel subscription and not able to view free to air channels when your subscription is over.

Picture & Sound Quality:

Positive:

I am not sure what to say about quality. I guess its OK. won’t say its awesome. I mean its the same as I used to get on my Local wired cable. Sound quality again, I would say its ok because I did not use any hi-fi audio system with it. I could not check the digital audio, SPDIF as well because I did not have anything to check as I am using my Tata Sky + a 21″ Sony television. I don’t have any HDTV. So really can’t say anything about Picture and audio quality because. It looks fine on my television though.

Negative:

I have heard the signal gets lost whenever its about to rain. I have not experienced it though. But a lot of people have told me about it. So, better watch out for what if you want to have an uninterrupted service. Because the services are down for at least 10 minutes or so before the rain actually starts.

Live Pause Play Feature :

Positives:

You can record up to 2 channels simultaneously and watch one of them.

Easy to understand the pause and play functions. Easy to setup recording a program and setup the capture for later purpose.

Record programs even when your Tata Sky Plus is on stand by.

Record even when your Television is turned off.

Negatives:

You can not pause recording, for example if you want to skip ads in your final recording you can not do that. You can pause the channel using live pause and play feature but since Tata Sky Plus keeps recording everything as soon as you start watching the channel its not possible to pause the recording and skip advertisements or any other part that you don’t want to record and reply. So if you are watching the match and recording it at the same time there is no way you can skip ads and leave match only. When you replay the recorded match you will have to watch those advertisements as well. I wish it had an option to remove adverts automatically.

If you click on record on a channel it will start recording the channel from the time you’ve been watching the channel. For example if you have been watching a movie on HBO for the last 2 hours and did not change the channel and you press record button now the recoded program will start from 90 minutes earlier as you have been watching the movie from then. So practically if would not record from the time you push record button, it will actually add 90 minutes before that to your program. This can become kind of messy keeping in mind we don’t have any edit option. So your Tata Sky Plus is going to get bulky day by day and HDD will get filled very early.

Recording is encrypted with your subscription. OK Let me explain that to you. For example if you have recorded a Match today. Obviously you would have subscribed to Sports pack. Now if you unsubscribe the sports pack next month and try to watch the match you recorded, you won’t be able to do so. I spoke with customer service and they said “Sir whenever you want to watch the match again just subscribe to Star Cricket package and you will be able to view the recorded match” WTF ? Why would I want to subscribe to Star Cricket again when I know there is no cricket on that for the next 3 months? Is that what you call Digital Video Recorder? No, they need to do something about it and that too really fast.

No option to rename recorded videos let me explain this by an example. If you happen to record a series then it would show the episode name with 10 entries and you would have to play all of them to get to know which one to play. So no date nothing is mentioned in the recorded list. 45 hours of recording time is too much but Tata Sky Plus simply lacks the management of recorded program. I mean folders and search with rename and edit feature could have been a really boost to this DVR.

Tata Sky Plus has 160 GB of HDD but only 80 GB is used for recording. Rest is used for live pause feature, which according to me is too much because you can only have a buffer of 90 minutes for any channel. As soon as you move to a different channel the old cache gets deleted and Tata Sky Plus starts recording the new channel and keeps the last 90 minutes in buffer. OK, my whole point is that 90 minutes and Tata Sky Plus Operating System could have been managed in max to max 10 GB space. The rest of the space could have been utilized in recording. So basically Tata Sky Plus could house atleast around 70 hours of recording compared to 45 hours now.

Channels:

Positives:

I would say none, as I did not find anything useful in terms of channels. There is a whole load of crap though. I mean the Active thing. It’s totally useless. In 10 million subscribers, i think only 10 would be using these.

Negative:

No selection of channels of your choice. Everything is divided in to packages and those packages are so strategically designed that if you want to watch Discovery, BBC News Colors and Star Cricket you will have to subscribe to all the packages because every package contains a good channel that every damn person watches in India. For that, you need to pay a handsome amount of 300-350 Rs which is way beyond what I was paying to my local cable guy.

Your account needs to be active all the time for you to watch any channel even if you don’t have account balance. Not even free to air channels are served when your account is inactive or nil. So you will have to pay at least 125 Rs every month to watch any channel.

You can not add free to air channels. No matter what this is something that I really thought would not be the case. Its one of the basic features a customer would ask for. I mean no body wants to pay to view free to air channels and neither Tata is paying anything to the broadcasters. Why is that a problem with Tata Sky.

Future Proof :

Tata Sky Plus will be able to provide Internet connection through the STB.

Final Verdict :

Tags: Customer Care, Indian Media, review

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