Tuesday, September 14, 2004
First off, Haneal just got back from the US, and he brought some presents for me with him: Burnout 3 (Xbox), Madden 2005 (Xbox), and the special 10th Anniversary DVD of Clerks. The downside is he bought copies for himself to play on Xbox Live, and... they won't work on his Xbox.
More on the greatness of Burnout tomorrow though. Today is all about TV. And not downloaded shows or anything, I mean real live TV. As covered in a previous post, local TV here sucks. Thanks to a myriad of pay-TV options though things aren't quite as grim as I suggested.
The first one is satellite channel Star TV, which covers the whole of Asia and thus caters more to an Indian audience. We don't have Star TV, but I don't think this is a huge problem -- the best channels there are Star Plus (lots of second-tier US sitcoms) and Star Movies (roughly equivalent to HBO, though I think HBO is better), neither of which I'm too keen on.
The second one is HK's own Wharf Cable, otherwise creatively known as... Cable TV. I rather like Cable TV because it has a ton of excellent channels (AXN, CNN, Discovery, HBO, etc) and most of the live football. On the downside, Cable TV is totally geared towards a HK audience (97% Chinese, remember), meaning that outside of the "brand name" channels like Cartoon Network or BBC you're not going to get anything more than the bare minimum in English. With football, for instance, all you get is English match commentary because the pre/post game shows are all in Cantonese. What makes it worse though are that the team there seems to treat the local footballing public as a bunch of brainless monkeys or something, because the pre/post game shows tend to resemble stupid parties with people dancing and screaming and handing out prizes and doing anything BUT showing the highlights. The biggest problem with Cable TV though are reception issues. If you're confused, this is because we get our Cable TV from a dish on the roof -- a dish that fails every time there's any rain (and remember HK is in the tropics). This is annoying, believe me.
The only reason the third option is any relevant at all is because Cable lost the license to show ESPN and Star Sports in Hong Kong to NOW Broadband TV. NOW is operated by HK's dominant telephone company and ISP, and I have a broadband account with them (which I'm very happy with, thank you very much, HK$300 for 6Mbit DSL!). Since ESPN/Star has the sole rights for the UEFA Champions League, I had to have it, so I subscribed to NOW and gave it a solid test run tonight during the first round of Champions League matches... and unfortunately, I'm not impressed.
Firstly, yes, this is "Broadband TV". That means the NOW box plugs into my broadband modem and my TV is delivered down the DSL line. I was worried at first that it'd cut the speed of my DSL connection, and despite assurances from people that it doesn't, it does. On the bright side, just switching the box off when you're not watching boosts your speed back up to normal, and it doesn't go THAT slowly, but it is annoying. The flipside though isn't how the TV affects my computers, but how my computers affect the TV. Though there doesn't appear to be any major damage in that direction (and the picture quality is really good), the sound is pretty poor. It seems to lose sync after 15 minutes or so, and then will start to break up. I'm not sure why it happens, but I'm hoping it's just an early glitch or a problem on their end. I know I wasn't downloading anything at the time, but it's a 6Mbit line and it's 5am -- surely the TV and computers can co-exist even with my download speeds cut?
The NOW box can do a lot more than Cable's too. Cable's box can basically bring up a channel list, it can try (and fail) to pull up a channel guide, and that's about it. NOW's box has channel previews, a (working!) channel guide, and you can even add new channels straight from the box's UI (rather than calling customer support). The flipside though is that IT'S SO SLOW. Again: I have a 6Mbit line. Why does it take so damned long to pull up a TEXT-BASED channel guide? In the time it takes to pull up the channel guide that 6Mbit line can suck down a song from iTunes.
Where NOW really loses it though is with channels. Don't get me wrong here, they have a very good selection... but ESPN, Star, and an Asian (as opposed to Chinese) MTV aside, Cable has everything they have AND a couple of important heavyweights like AXN and CNN that NOW doesn't have. What almost makes it worse for NOW but better for us is that NOW's channels are a-la-carte: You only pay for the channels you pick (plus 10 useless free channels). So I just have ESPN and Star. And even if I wanted other channels -- like Asian MTV, which I do kinda want -- I'm rather hesitant to go on and order them because the more NOW Broadband TV I watch, the slower my broadband line is. And man, can you imagine MTV with the audio out of sync? Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
Hopefully it'll get better, because if NOW ruin my Liverpool game tomorrow heads will roll.
Posted at 4:34 AM
