Vodafone TV & SKY

[eliaskanaris]

Hi Hamish, This is very disappointing. I have been a Vodafone customer for years, using your Ultra Fast broadband service since it came available on my street (prior to that VDSL and ADSL). Similarly, I have been a Sky TV customer forever. I recently was invited to renew my account with Vodafone and after talking to Toby in your call centre, he originally suggested that I transfer to Vodafone TV. As we discussed my setup at home, he then suggested that he resign me on a Sky TV package with a recommendation that I visited the local store to find out more about Vodafone TV. On the 31st I walked into the Albany store in the mall and spoke with Nifae Fesolai. He took me through Vodafone TV and explained what it can do. He pointed out ONE thing in relation to a limitation in recording some content that Vodafone didn't have the rights for. It was a limitation that I was willing to live with (having said that, it would have been good to have a resource where I could identify which content was off limits!). Today I received my Vodafone TV boxes (the modem arrived last I week) and I set it all up (relatively easy and pretty much plug and play -- well done!). HOWEVER, I did not expect that we would have to deal with the intermittent freezing thato is happening. Given that it is a known issue, I think that it should have been disclosed to me when I signed up. To say that I'm disappointed would be an understatement. I think on reflection that I will send back the Vodafone TV and revert back to Sky TV. Sorry Vodafone, this is a major fail on your part. Many thanks, Elias

[ewanc]

Thanks for the update. Good to hear vodafone are putting customers needs at the top. After all without us there is no you.

Ive been a vodafone customer for years and have had my problems even last week i had a bad experience with a call centre person who seemed to think i was his Mate and kept on referring to me as Mate, when i too exception he clearly did not understsnd my dislike.

Needless to say the call ended badly, i was excepting a return call with an apology, but i guess Vodafone dont listen too all the recorded calls.

That been said i will stick vodafone. You have your faults, like all the telcos but i prefer vodafone too the others, and thats my choice.

[eliaskanaris]

So I thought that I would post an update here. As you can see from my first post, the experience was less than desirable when I obtained the service. TV 1 was suffering from chronic freezing as were a number of other channels. In unsure what has happened in the background, but the issue does seem to have been resolved. Well done! I realise that this service is different from Sky TV from a user interface perspective, so we will persevere and learn how to drive the remote to get the most out of it. It would be useful if there was a tutorial video that showed the short cuts that we could use.

[MikeHales]

Happy to report that over the weekend our team of engineers worked around the clock to successfully implement a fix that has resolved the Vodafone TV freezing issue.

 
We acknowledge we have fallen short of delivering a great Vodafone TV experience for all of our customers and would like to put things right. We will be sending an email to ALL our existing Vodafone TV customers to advise of the freezing issue resolution and offer a 50% discount to their base monthly TV and broadband plan on their December bill.

What happened

We recently undertook a major upgrade to the Vodafone TV platform to enable us to launch new features in the future that customers have been asking for, such as visual fast forward and rewind. The freezing issue began following this upgrade.

Again, we're sorry about the issue.

[PhilClark]

Thats great news, thanks for keeping us up to date with whats happening.

[neillo1]

Freezing may have been fixed but now screen goes blank for a couple of seconds every ten minutes or so. Doesn't this stuff get tested before release?

[PhilClark]

Im not getting the blank spots. I've had a couple of good nights watching without any problems on various channels with a couple of recordings. Nice to see it running well.

[G571]

Hi, good to hear the freezing issue may have been addressed but we still get the screen going blank every now and then, esepecially when changing between tv1 & tv2 in the evening, we have to restart the STB to get it going again. Very annoying and frutstrating. Also another weird thing has started happening in the last couple of weeks, when watching a program all of a sudden we'll get an error message in the top right of the screen saying something like 'Error improper function encountered' (or someting like this message) even though no one is even touching the remote at the time? Very odd, it's probably happened about 10 times now

[Rooney]

yep exactly the same thing happening here, like you say especially changing between tv1 -tv2 at  7 oclock (yes i know.......im a shorty fan)

[PeterKivell]

Hi Mike nd Hamish, thanks for the heads up to the upcomming update of the Vodafone TV box. Q: what is the time frame for this upgrade?