I’ve been using BT Vision since May 2007. A year on and I’m one of 250,000 customers in the UK – a small, but significant band of hardy IPTV pioneers.
After my V-Box, Home Hub and the rest of the system’s paraphernalia arrived last year, I’d have happily bet against BT’s IPTV and Freeview hybrid being around in 2008. At least in my house.
Rewind to the middle of 2007, however, and it was a very different story.
Why BT Vision had a slow start
If you’re looking for a dictionary definition of the ‘curse of the early adopter’, BT Vision was it. The system was prone to crashing, sometime predictably and sometime randomly. A case of never buy version 1.0 if ever there was one.
Scroll too quickly through the Microsoft-powered EPG and the whole thing would lock up. Watch a live program and it would often freeze. Play a recorded show and you couldn’t always be sure you’d get to the end of it.
At its best, in 2007 BT Vision was dependably undependable. And that was just the TV and DVR side of things. Move to movies on demand and the selection of available films was B-List at best. Worse still, you’d be lucky if you got to the end of your rental without the V-box needing a restart or two.
A lot of water has passed under the BT Vision bridge since then. Some radical software updates have addressed the system’s inherent instability and I’ve not had to restart the V-box for months.
Equally commendable are the improvements to the selection of on demand movies – you can watch solid blockbusters like I am Legend, Enchanted or American Gangster for between £3.45 and £3.99.
You can also watch movies and on-demand content in the relaxed in knowledge you’ll get to the end without the V-Box having a fit.
Can BT Vision threaten Sky, Virgin Media?
A year on, and BT Vision has become a stable and reliable platform with some good content. But compared to Sky’s 8,880,000 subscribers and Virgin Media’s 3.5 million devotees, it’s still a small fish in the UK's DTV pond.
Going forward, Two Way Media has been approached to work on 16 games for the service. Meanwhile, Pace has been tasked with delivering a new generation of HD-capable V-Boxes.
BT Vision is now, dare I say it, reasonable value for money. I pay £28 per month, which also includes 8Mbit/s uncapped BT broadband and VoIP calls.
Sure there are still some occasional glitches in the BT Vision service. But if BT manages to continue the same trajectory of improvement it has made in both the infrastructure and the content it makes available, it certainly deserves the 250,000 customers it’s won so far.
Are you a BT Vision subscriber? What do you think of the service? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
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blueg
June 9th 2008
1. I have BT Vision - it's buggy, long winded in places and a bit runnish overall.
But, the thing is FREE (I even got the £30 "install" waived) and you can't ask for much better than a Freeview dual tuner PVR for nothing really.
BT Broadband is expensive, but decent, especially at Option 3 level. The homehub is attractive and doesn't crash (which is AMAZING for a router), so the integration to BT Vision is great.
However, the OD side of things - which was free - was a great selling point for me, and now I have to pay for it I don't feel like I'm getting the same value for money. (I know it's free, but still.)
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