Just been reading that some poor sucker ditched his Sky setup and replaced it with BT Vision.

BT Vision is some kind of Freeview thing with the added bonus of pay-per-view live soccer and films all delivered over broadband. Needless to say as it was such a new service it didn’t work too good. He said that in the month he has had it he has had to reboot the box every single day at least once. The reboot takes between 5 & 15 minutes. He is not popular with his family right now.

Other problems were that he couldn’t get the box into standby, a downloaded film stopped after 20 minutes which he was nevertheless charged for, the helpdesk new nothing about BT Vision and the picture kept freezing. All predictable stuff for a new service.

Obviously though this service has been started it still sounds like its in beta test. The good thing from BT’s point of view is that you get users to test it for you and they pay for the privilege. The bad thing from BT’s point of view is that if the system is too flakey then you get a lot of bad press, which they will do now.

Why do these things happen. Why has some hardware been released to the public when it is unfit for purpose. I suppose if it was still in beta testing and all of these bugs came flying out, with no doubt more in the future, someone would get a sharp wrap across the knuckles. It won’t be the brilliant designers, it’ll be the hapless testers that found all of these horrible issues and that have now mucked up BT’s release.

It’s taken Sky and Virgin Media years to get where they have a stable product. What made BT think they can get into a new business where they have no experience and that it will work first time beats me.