4TV postscript

Pretty much as I predicted, Beko – the company that’s now owner of the Digifusion name – is not going to produce a firmware update to make the old PVRs use the standard Freeview EPG.

Some owners on Digital Spy are reporting that Beko is offering £70 to owners of some models of PVR, in exchange for the old units, as a gesture of goodwill. The offer depends on the serial number of your unit, and essentially only applies to those sold after Beko acquired the assets of Digifusion.

The Beko contact page is here.

If you want to recap the whole tale, this is a good place to start.

The end of the affair

As I’ve written about before, the demise of the 4TV programme guide has left owners of several brands of Freeview recorders without an easy way to schedule recordings. And now, I think, we can say that the coffin lid has been pretty well nailed down, and the chances of a resumption of the EPG service are pretty much extinguished.

I’ve said before that I think it would be unlikely, despite the online petition (which now stands at around 1500 signatures), that anyone would step in and take over the service. So why am I even more certain? Because of Sony.

As mentioned in some of the comments to stories on this site, and elsewhere, Sony told the owners of their SVR-S500 that they were “looking into the matter” and some people gained the impression they might consider taking over the EPG service (though given they no longer run their own TVTV EPG on Freeview, that would have been an odd decision).

What makes that look even less likely is this email, sent to an SVR-S500 owner (I’ve removed identifying information):

Thank you for your recent e-mail received on 09/07/2010 08.00 AM.

Thank you for contacting Sony regarding your Sony SVR-S500.

In recent weeks we have been contacted by a number of customers with reference to the loss of EPG service on their SVR-S500 Freeview recorder.

This loss of service is, very basically, due to the EPG data stream, specific for this product, no longer being broadcast as of the 29th June.

Since this date, the electronic programme guide will now only display the ‘Now’ and ‘Next’ information; where before it would display up to 8 days of programme lists.

As a result, we are aware that you will no longer be able to see forthcoming programmes or use the EPG to record them in advance. However all other functions will continue as before, with the product still able to display the Freeview broadcast and record programmes via the manual timer function.

However, with the change in service firmly in mind, we have put in a place an offer to give you the option to trade-in your SVR-S500 and get £100 off of one of the following Freeview HDD/DVD recorders:

RDR-DC200

RDR-DC100

Details of these models and their full features and specifications can be found on www.sony.co.uk. Please note however that new ranges do not feature twin Freeview tuners but these products do come with built in DVD recorders which is an added benefit.

If you wish to participate in the trade-in, you can either do this by contacting our Sony Centre Sales line on 0845 6000 124 (select option 1) where they can arrange for you to reserve and collect the new product via your local Sony Centre, or, you can visit your local Sony Centre directly. The offer will run from midday on 29 July. Details of your nearest Sony Centre can be found via www.sonycentres.co.uk. Please note you will need to return the SVRS500 to the Sony Centre to obtain the discount.

I hope that this offer helps you with the current situation.

I’ve called the number in that email to verify the offer, and it is indeed correct – select option 1 first, then option 3 from the next menu; the person I spoke with told me you have to have registered with the support line first to let you know there’s a problem, but they’ll be able to transfer you.

Sony's offer to SVR-S500 PVR owners: £100 off a new Freeview+ DVD/hard disk recorder

You can see the specs for the RDR-DC200 and RDR-DC100 on the Sony web site; they’re single tuner Freeview+ units with a DVD recorder; the DC100 has a 160GB hard drive, and the DC200 a 250GB drive.

So, if Sony are handing out discounts and arranging trade-ins of their affected PVRs, I think it’s fair to say that they’re not going to be suddenly starting up an EPG service for even fewer people, especially when the majority of those people will probably not even be their customers.

And, I think this is the final nail in the coffin because the other companies involved don’t have a presence in the UK market for PVRs at the moment. Sony is the only company that would perhaps have suffered from goodwill issues if nothing was done, and so they’re addressing that – and good on them for making an offer. The replacement products might not be exactly what you want, but £100 is a pretty reasonable deal, in my opinion.

The only other company that might really be in a position to do something about restarting the EPG is Beko – and while those who are online and reading about this issue will know of their involvement, I suspect that the vast majority of people affected aren’t aware at all. As I’ve commented before, would you be more likely to buy a Beko fridge, if the guide reappeared on a Thomson or Digifusion PVR?

I don’t think so – and so I don’t think Beko will view this as their problem at all. If there was ever going to be a resumption of the EPG, then Sony would have been the best bet. And their offer to affected customers suggests that they’ve done the sums, and decided a trade-in scheme is far more cost-effective than buying capacity, licensing an EPG, and paying someone to transmit it. They got out of that business in the UK with TVTV, and leaping back in for an obsolete product was never likely to happen.

So, unless something unexpected happens, I think that’s the end of the 4TV affair.

3View – 4TV is no cause for concern

When I wrote about the situation with the 4TV-based Freeview PVRs a couple of weeks ago, some readers made the assumption that, reading between the lines, I was suggesting people don’t buy equipment that hasn’t got the official Freeview or Freeview HD logo on the box, and given that the one box that’s eagerly anticipated by many but doesn’t have Freeview HD certification is the one from British start-up 3View, some readers might have drawn the conclusion that I was talking about them.

As I said in a comment to that post, I wasn’t specifically referring to anyone, and I’m certainly not going to tell people to make a decision one way or another about the 3View box when I’ve yet to play with it (I declined the offer of a pre-production unit, preferring to wait until the release version, with final firmware).

All that said, the cessation of the 4TV service and the problems caused for people left with no EPG on their device has made some people wonder about the wisdom of buying something that isn’t Freeview certified. So, I tackled that question head on earlier today, in a conversation with 3View’s Robert Blackwell.

Key facts

3View's box doesn't have the Freeview sticker on it - but does that really matter?

The most important message for people to bear in mind is that there isn’t really a chance of the sort of problems caused by the missing 4TV EPG affecting the 3View box. Although it’s designed from a fairly internet-centric point of view, with easy access to catch up services from the programme guide, it is also perfectly capable of working without an internet connection at all. It can use enhanced programme guides from the internet (which allow things like clicking on programmes to buy them on DVD, or accessing catch-up TV), or it can quite happily work with the standard Freeview broadcast EPG. So, whatever happens, you’ll have an EPG, from which you can set recordings.

And, 3View has already confirmed that the box will be able to access the EPG for Freeview’s HD channels, which has content controls, so you’ll be good for both HD and SD channels.

Online services

What of online services? While the core TV recording functionality is clearly able to continue whatever happens to 3View, the box promises lots of other neat tools and tricks. According to Blackwell, the online widgets are standard Opera widgets, so while 3View may have some available on their own site and through their own portal for you to add, it’s essentially an open system.

And, where you install a widget that accesses information from, say, the BBC News site, your box will be accessing that information directly. In other words, 3View isn’t running servers through which all the information reaching your box has to pass. So, again, even if they were to go the way of the 4TV guide, you wouldn’t lose out on services provided by other people – you’ll still have a box that can connect to and display online content.

So why not certify?

The Freeview logo: reassurance of compatibility? Or 'Just tv'?

The obvious question for many people, then, is why not certify? Wouldn’t the FreeviewHD logo provide people with some extra degree of reassurance?

Perhaps – but 3View’s Blackwell outlined some other reasons why not. With Project Canvas creating a new class of connected boxes with a powerful brand name, 3View feels that in the longer term the ‘Freeview’ label may be seen by consumers as meaning more basic boxes, lacking the online services that will assume a higher profile when Canvas (probably to be called YouView) launches next year.

Certification would also require the use of an MHEG system, which provides the ‘red button’ interactive features used by the BBC; while some people may miss those, Blackwell is confident that many of the functions will be able to be replicated through widgets – and for those who do want to access specific BBCi content, they’ll almost certainly have a TV that’s capable of displaying it anyway. And, in my own experience, MHEG can slow down boxes, and has been the cause of plenty of bugs in various PVRs over the years.

The Freeview label, in other words, is seen as potentially limiting the marketing options. 3View’s box is compliant with the key technical standards, like DVB-T2, and agreement to use the HD EPG as well as the ability to pick up the standard Freeview programme guide should ensure that whatever the fortunes of the company themselves, the boxes will carry on working just fine.

4TV – Freeview to the rescue? Or perhaps the OFT

Not long after I wrote my previous post about 4TV, a few news reports cropped up suggesting that Freeview might be coming to the rescue, though what they actually said was merely that they’d be talking to the third party concerned.

Frankly, I don’t think there’s much chance of Freeview stepping in to pay for the service – and don’t forget that InView say they no longer have the bandwidth that’s required to transmit it in any case, which makes things even more expensive to do.

There is – of course – an online petition asking Freeview to re-instate the EPG, but I’m still not of the opinion that it will actually make much difference. Nor do I really think may people will defect to Sky or Freesat as a result – though I’d hope that if they buy replacement equipment, they’ll make sure that it conforms to the digital tick.

A tangled web

I know some people will think this is a somewhat defeatist attitude, but I honestly will be very surprised if someone coughs up the money to fund a service for a small number of people who, legally speaking, aren’t even their customers.

That, I’m afraid, is just realism about how things work – and in particular about how they can work in a world where electronic equipment develops so quickly, and a product that you buy in a shop may actually rely on so many external factors to work correctly that, ultimately, the end user has little or no chance of knowing who to blame if something goes wrong – and there we have some echoes, perhaps, of the situation regarding surround sound on Freeview as well.

In this case, as the legal people at Which have said, along with other experts on consumer law that I’ve spoken with, there really is very little chance of redress.

A wider issue

While it’s certainly frustrating for people who have the affected bits of kit, I think there’s perhaps a better use of ones energy than campaigning to get an EPG brought back for a couple of years, for some equipment that’s pretty old already.

The PVRs affected aren’t by any means the only equipment sold that relies on services from elsewhere for part of their functionality. Take DVD and Blu-ray players, for example, not to mention many other gadgets. Very often these rely on a service called Gracenote, which displays a track listing when you pop a CD in. Gracenote is now owned by Sony, and I have absolutely no reason to imagine that they’ll ever do anything other than keep it going.

But what if they did decide to pull the plug? You’d find that suddenly, you couldn’t just pick the track you wanted to play from a helpful list on screen, when you popped a disc into your player. You’d have to look at the case, and find the number, and work it out that way, just like the people with the 4TV-based PVRs are having to set recordings manually.

And you know what? There’s nothing you could do about it. A feature that you thought was part of a bit of equipment you’ve bought turns out to be reliant on a service provided by a third party, with whom you have no contractual arrangement, and very likely absolutely no rights in law.

It’s the label, darling

I’m sure other readers of this blog can think of other products that, similarly, rely for a part of their functionality on a service that’s provided by someone else. You might call it, perhaps, an ‘implied subscription’ to that service, except of course that’s not really recognised in law: unless something says “With 3 years free subscription to XYZ service” then you can’t really complain when the service stops after two years.

And thinking about it, it would make consumer law even more complicated, if there were some sort of liability established to try and ensure the continuing provision of services. You can’t really make shopkeepers liable for something done by a company they’ve never heard of, can you? You might say that if a service is provided, then a company should have funds set aside to pay for it – but for how long? And wouldn’t that hamper many sstart-up companies before they even got to the launch?

So, I’m not sure there’s an awful lot that can be done, especially in such a complicated and interconnected world, where products and company allegiances change all the time.

Look for this symbol to guarantee compatibility with digital TV services, up to and beyond DSO

The ‘Digital Tick’ is supposed to let people know that a product will work throught the switchover to all-digital TV, and beyond; none of the boxes that are affected by the 4TV problems was certified. So perhaps that’s an important lesson for people there.

But in the wider arena, perhaps there’s also something to be said for a similar mark, or indication, not as a statement of approval – such schemes involve more cost, inevitably – but simply a clear and unambiguous statement so that people can know, when they look at a piece of equipment, that a significant feature or part of its functionality relies on a service provided by a third party. So you’d know if a PVR relied on a service like 4TV, or if a Blu-ray player used Gracenote, and you could factor that into your decisions when buying.

There would be work involved in working out what qualifies – for example, the standard Freeview EPG isn’t provided by box manufacturers, but it doesn’t really qualify as a third party service; it’s just there, as part of the platform. I daresay people will think it ever so onerous – but manuals already contain loads of regulatory information as it is. How hard would it be to put an icon next to a feature that relies on a third party? Or perhaps a list near the back page, with URLs? All that is probably a matter for the Office of Fair Trading, I guess.

As devices become more complicated, and provide more and more features, which are often bought in from other suppliers, I think perhaps it is about time there was more transparency in terms of letting people know what’s probably going to carry on working indefinitely, and what might disappear at a moment’s notice, if a contract runs out, or a company goes bust – even one of which you’ve never heard.

So long, 4TV

If you own a Thomson DHD-4000, a Sony SVR-S500, an Inverto IDL-7000T or one of a few Digifusion models of Freeview digital TV recorder, you’ll have noticed by now that the programme guide isn’t working properly.

Do not adjust your set. As explained in this news item on Digital Spy, the company that broadcast the programme guide isn’t doing so anymore, leaving users with a box that may display now and next, and on which scheduling recordings won’t be very easy at all.

A lot of people have, understandably, been getting quite hot under the collar on various web forums, wanting to know if they can complain, or take someone to court, or do something to get their EPG back. So, how has this happened, and is there any redress?

A little bit of history

Freeview now has a 7 day programme guide, which uses an industry standard, and so can be picked up by any box that understand that standard. But it wasn’t always like that – the guide was rolled out in the second half of 2004. Without a full guide, it’s hard to make a recorder that’s easy to use, and when the first Digifusion models were launched, the Freeview guide wasn’t available. So, a system was set up where a programme guide would be broadcast overnight (when capacity is cheaper and easier to come by) and the boxes would automatically save it. The company broadcasting the guide was known as 4TV, later to become part of InView.

Alongside the Digifusion boxes, the others I mentioned at the start of the article used the system – even though some of them were launched after the Freeview guide had been rolled out. Perhaps it was cheaper to use that, rather than re-write the software to use the industry standard; perhaps they thought that the 14 days eventually offered by 4TV was a good marketing point, compared to the 7 days of the Freeview guide.

Either way, boxes carried on using the 4TV guide when there was a free alternative – and the free alternative now has information for things like series links, and automatic rescheduling when programmes run over, which just isn’t possible with a guide that’s transmitted once a day.

Where are we now?

Perhaps, then, it’s not surprising that no new boxes use the 4TV system, all preferring instead to use the standard, and the Freeview+ features is provides. Meanwhile, the part of Thomson that made their box isn’t operating in the UK; Inverto doesn’t appear interested in the Freeview market, Sony abandoned their PVR (which in any case was made for them by Beko), and the Difigusion brand was subsumed into Beko too – and they don’t appear to be involved in the Freeview market anymore either.

And so, as is the way with contracts, the one for the broadcast of the guide data came to an end, and there was no one to pay for it. InView’s a business, and you can’t really blame them for not carrying on, when they wouldn’t be paid for it.

You can’t, really, blame Freeview, either – they were never responsible for the 4TV guide being there in the first place, and it would be an awkward precedent if they (and don’t forget, Freeview is really just a marketing thing, for the idea of free to air TV) stumped up the cash to take over from someone else’s failed business venture, when there’s a perfectly standard guide that’s broadcast, for anyone to use.

Something must be done!

In law, the only people you have a contract with are the people who sold you the box; you have no relationship with InView/4TV, so no redress – and only the most venal of ambulance chasing lawyers would even suggest they owed you any duty of care.

So, can you go back to your retailer, and demand they do something? Well, frankly, you’d have a pretty hard job, in my view. Yes, as some people will point out, there are rules and regulations that say you may have a claim for up to six years – but that’s not set in stone.

In particular, those rules really relate to faulty products; the recorder you have isn’t faulty – it’s just that a service provided by a third party is no longer available. And just as you didn’t have a contract with InView, nor did the shop where you bought the box.

Even if you could claim that a recorder should last six years – and in a field like Freeview, a clever lawyer will argue that’s pushing it a bit – any compensation you could get would have to take into allowance the fact that you have had a certain amount of use – you’re not going to get back the cost of something, after using it for four or five years.

In short, there’s not really anything you could achieve through the law, other than making lawyers happier and richer.

An appealing prospect?

An appeal to the better natures of the companies involved is about the only thing that might be possible. But even then, frankly, I doubt it would do any good. InView aren’t going to spend their own money when they don’t have to. The water company’s not going to give you free water, just because your landlord has gone bust and stopped paying the bills, are they?

In theory, it might be possible to update some of these boxes to use the standard guide – but they’re old, the people who worked on the software will have moved on, and in most cases the companies that created the equipment either don’t exist in the same form, or have decided not to compete in that market anyway.

And if a big company like Beko, for example, isn’t competing in the UK market for Freeview equipment, under its own name or another one, there’s really little incentive for them to do anything. The cost of creating new software, or arranging the broadcast of an EPG is probably far more than the cost of any goodwill that might be lost through not doing anything.

Let’s face it, relatively few people are affected, and fewer of those would even know which company to blame, or whom to thank if an EPG suddenly appeared. Who’d go out and buy a Beko fridge because the programme guide started working again on a five year old Thomson, Digifusion, or Inverto PVR?

I’m sorry, but there’s not really any other way to put this – if you have one of these recorders, time’s up. Start saving for an alternative, because nothing’s going to bring back the programme guide.

Freeview – who makes what, and why it matters

Following on from my recent post about the various names of the Vestel T8300 HD receiver, Marc over at PVR Junction has helpfully sent a list of some of the other brands that have rebadged Vestel equipment for the UK, together with a link to an unofficial web site with more information.

So, these are the brands that have sold Vestel Freeview PVRs under their own name in the UK:

• Akura
• Alba
• Bush
• Digihome
• Dual
• Durabrand
• Evesham
• Ferguson
• Goodmans
• Grundig
• Hitachi
• Linsar
• Logik
• Luxor
• Maplin
• ONN
• Proline
• Sharp
• Technika
• Techwood
• Wharfedale

As again, note that this doesn’t mean that everything with that badge on was made by Vestel; check the label on the bottom and see if any part of the model number corresponds to one of the Vestel ‘T’ numbers listed on the Futaura site.

Some companies will simply buy in what looks best at the time. For example, there has also been a Wharfedale PVR that was a rebadged TVonics, and while Goodmans and Grundig have used Vestel kit in the past, their current Freeview HD boxes are made by someone else, as far as I can tell – they certainly aren’t the Vestel T8300.

A big boy did it and ran away

On the subject of rebadging, you might think it’s just the second and third tier brands who do this sort of thing, while the big well known global companies diligently create shiny new products in their test labs.

That’s not the case. Sony’s SVR-S500 Freeview PVR wasn’t really a Sony product at all. It was a twin tuner recorder, with a miserly 80GB hard drive – though to be fair, it was released around four years ago.

Rather than being a Sony design, it was really a re-badged Digifusion FVRT200. And this is where things start to become curiouser and curiouser. The Digifusion was one of a few products that didn’t use the main Freeview programme guide. Instead, it relied on a channel which some people might remember, called 4TV. This was a data channel that seemed to do nothing most of the time, and if you watched it, you would think it was a waste of space.

What it actually did was broadcast a fourteen day programme guide in the middle of the night, which was stored by various devices, including the Digifusion models. Sony, for whatever strange reason of their own, cut the programme guide down to seven days on the SVR-S500, effectively meaning that you paid extra money to get a Sony badge on a Digifusion recorder, and had only eight days of EPG, rather than fourteen.

Fast forward to this year; 4TV is now InView, and they’ve announced that since the contract hasn’t been renewed for them to broadcast the programme guide, they’re stopping. So, if you have a Digifusion recorder, or the Sony clone (both were made by Beko, another Turkish firm), you’ll find that there isn’t a programme guide any more, making it much harder to schedule recordings.

Of course, a four year old Freeview recorder that can only record one thing at a time, and has just an 80GB hard drive sounds like pretty ancient technology now. But wouldn’t you think that if you paid for a big brand name like Sony, you wouldn’t be left with something that had vastly reduced functionality, just four years later?