It's been about 5 and a half years since I've moved from the city to a town, and since then I didn't really have a TV subscription. Well, technically I did, but I couldn't really use it. You see, in the city I had cable. When I moved here I subscribed to an IPTV service but couldn't really use it, since the TV is on the ground floor and the closest Ethernet cable is upstairs.
Fast forward to today and I had satellite TV set up. This way, the dish is relatively close to the TV and it works. But here come the problems. I can't stand set-top boxes. They are a waste of space, electricity, batteries, and sanity. Not only do they make you use two separate remotes, but this way, the TV signal skips the TV's OS, so most if not all of the TV's features go to waste as it gets reduced to a simple display. This is especially annoying if you, like me, have an expensive smart TV that you were looking forward to using for anything else than YouTube and now you realise you could've bought a much cheaper, dumber TV, and saved your money for something else.
Now, you might be thinking, “hey silly, you don't need a set-top box to watch TV. Simply get a keycard>Common Interface adaptor, plug that and the dish cable into your TV and you can avoid using that set-top box ever again!” Believe me, I would love to do that, but these people apparently have DRM or something on their signal, because when I asked the guy who set it up this same question, he said the boxes and the dish are 'linked' and that I can't do that. He also mentioned this would've been possible in the past, but they outright stopped supporting it. Back then they had the option to choose between using a set-top box or just your TV, but there were people who were butthurt that they had a set-top box and others didn't, and when they tried not having one they were too dumb to use their own TV's OS, so the provider decided that everyone would have to have a set-top box because its OS is 'easier to use and support' and it seems that people who are not too dumb to use their own TVs don't matter.
But is the set-top box's OS really that bad? Well it's not terrible, but it's still pretty bad. It's limited compared to my TV for a start. Also, it looks like as if it was designed in 2003 (except, amusingly, the system update screen, which looks suspiciously close to the modern PlayStation look), oh, and, to me, it looks like an accessibility nightmare. In the menu, the colour of highlighted and regular text is really similar. I have good vision and I still had trouble telling what option I was selecting the first time I was using it. And the English UI is badly translated.
Oh, and one last thing, which is not the set-top box's nor the provider's fault (...probably), but I have 7 movie channels and only 3 of them have an English audio option.
What the fuck?
(The display in the pictures is my monitor, not the smart TV downstairs)
UPDATE 2019.12.27:
So, my grandma recently got herself a new TV plan with these lads and guess what: she has no set-top-box. The TV signal runs directly into her TV and she's able to use her TV's stock OS and functions instead of this crappy thing. Needless to say I'll be calling up DIGI tomorrow.
UPDATE 2019.12.28:
Welp, turns out only cable users can use their TV without a set-top-box, not satellite ones, and we don't have the option to use cable. sigh
Fast forward to today and I had satellite TV set up. This way, the dish is relatively close to the TV and it works. But here come the problems. I can't stand set-top boxes. They are a waste of space, electricity, batteries, and sanity. Not only do they make you use two separate remotes, but this way, the TV signal skips the TV's OS, so most if not all of the TV's features go to waste as it gets reduced to a simple display. This is especially annoying if you, like me, have an expensive smart TV that you were looking forward to using for anything else than YouTube and now you realise you could've bought a much cheaper, dumber TV, and saved your money for something else.
Now, you might be thinking, “hey silly, you don't need a set-top box to watch TV. Simply get a keycard>Common Interface adaptor, plug that and the dish cable into your TV and you can avoid using that set-top box ever again!” Believe me, I would love to do that, but these people apparently have DRM or something on their signal, because when I asked the guy who set it up this same question, he said the boxes and the dish are 'linked' and that I can't do that. He also mentioned this would've been possible in the past, but they outright stopped supporting it. Back then they had the option to choose between using a set-top box or just your TV, but there were people who were butthurt that they had a set-top box and others didn't, and when they tried not having one they were too dumb to use their own TV's OS, so the provider decided that everyone would have to have a set-top box because its OS is 'easier to use and support' and it seems that people who are not too dumb to use their own TVs don't matter.
But is the set-top box's OS really that bad? Well it's not terrible, but it's still pretty bad. It's limited compared to my TV for a start. Also, it looks like as if it was designed in 2003 (except, amusingly, the system update screen, which looks suspiciously close to the modern PlayStation look), oh, and, to me, it looks like an accessibility nightmare. In the menu, the colour of highlighted and regular text is really similar. I have good vision and I still had trouble telling what option I was selecting the first time I was using it. And the English UI is badly translated.
Oh, and one last thing, which is not the set-top box's nor the provider's fault (...probably), but I have 7 movie channels and only 3 of them have an English audio option.
What the fuck?
(The display in the pictures is my monitor, not the smart TV downstairs)
UPDATE 2019.12.27:
So, my grandma recently got herself a new TV plan with these lads and guess what: she has no set-top-box. The TV signal runs directly into her TV and she's able to use her TV's stock OS and functions instead of this crappy thing. Needless to say I'll be calling up DIGI tomorrow.
UPDATE 2019.12.28:
Welp, turns out only cable users can use their TV without a set-top-box, not satellite ones, and we don't have the option to use cable. sigh
