The plus factor

Don’t miss another soap, just get DTH with pause and record
I have come to realise that there is nothing decent on TV on your off day and there is nothing good when you are back home in the evening. But there are some wonderful programmes when you are about to leave for office, or when it is too late for you to stay up. For years I have been toying with the idea of a personal video recorder at home. But this idea had its problems—one, I can only record what I am watching; two, if I am already watching, why would I want to record it. So when Tata Sky Plus was launched, I got myself a unit. Here’s what happened.

For starters, everything had to be installed once again—the old cable ripped out, two new cables put in its place, the old dish replaced with a new one. The silver Tata Sky box and grey remote gone, I had a new black box with shiny LEDs, the same card, and a new black remote in my hands. In place of the earlier 60-cm dish, Tata Sky now uses a 65-cm one, as well as a SHARP LNP to increase your reception quality, especially when it is raining. You need two wires since there are two tuners built into the box—one each for recording and viewing.

Like any geek, my first impulse was to look behind the box. There was an S-Video Out, a Component Out, a modem, an Ethernet port and even a USB port, though the last three are not of much use now.

The unit comes with a 160GB hard disk, good enough to record about 45 hours of programming. I had the 160GB used up in the first week itself—you then have the option of overwriting the oldest viewed recordings. You can upgrade the hard disk on your own, but it’s better to just get rid of viewed programmes. I also liked the feature that protects your recordings using a PIN. The recordings also include programme info and duration. You can set the recording to start 2 to 5 minutes before the programme and end after a similar gap, just in case programmes start a bit early. However, you can’t record radio or interactive channels.

The scheduler is nice, but despite the company’s claims, listings are available only for some channels, and that too for a maximum of 24 hours. I have also not been able to use the series link function that allows you to plan and record an entire series automatically. You can switch to live TV from recording with just a click, though at times the unit goes blank for a couple of minutes after this.

The new Menu is slower than that of the old Tata Sky, since programmes are being recorded as you watch to enable pause, rewind and resume. The rewind option is limited to the point where you started watching the channel. Though pause is a wonderful feature, it ends up making the whole unit slow. But the best feature is the power to skip through the advertisements in a recorded programme—I finished a 30-minute serial slot in about half the time, that is how much content there actually is.

New users will have to pay Rs 8,999 for the Plus, but it’s still a great buy.

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The Above article appeared in the Indian Express, on the 23rd of November 2008