BT Vision - Part 1 (Ordering it)
OK, so I didn’t keep to my promise about posting once per week. Naughty Sil! But I’m here and I’m posting now.
I’m here to talk about BT Vision… I recently moved into my old school mates house and now that he’s back from his travels we decided to go down the risky route of ordering a TV service which wasn’t satellite or cable! Here are some of the key reasons why we ordered BT Vision:
- Free V Box (i.e. the set top box which has a built in Tivo like device worth £199)
- Free Installation (worth £60)
- We already had BT Broadband which was one of the pre-requisites for getting BT Vision
- It’s pretty cheap (TV Value pack £14 + Football for £10 per month)
I know they’re not revolutionary reasons but seeing that we both like to be on the knife edge of technology, we bit the bullet and ordered the service. I’ll post regular updates (hence the Part 1) on our experience with BT Vision through the coming months.
Ordering Experience
So we decided to order online rather than speak to a real person on the phone and potentially having to wait a long time to get through. The website looks snazzy but the content is pretty light. It’s easy to navigate around the site however there are limited details on the TV packages and what you actually get with them. They are broken down in the following standard packages:
- Value Pack - £14 (Includes TV, TV Replay, Music Videos and Kids Packs saving £7 a month)
- TV Pack - £6
- TV & TV Replay Pack - £9
- Sport Pack from - £4
- Kids Pack - £6
- Music Video Pack - £6
Premium Packages include:
Standard Sports - £4 a month
* 242 Barclays Premier League matches available in full just hours after kick off
* 125 Coca-Cola Football League and Carling Cup games, plus archive sport
Setanta Sports - £9.99 a month
* 46 live Barclays Premier League games and live US PGA Tour golf
* 60 live Clydesdale Bank Premier League games and much more sport
Total Sports - £12 a month
* Full access to everything available in the Standard Sports and Setanta Sports packs
* Sport for 24 hours a day, seven days a week – live and On Demand
There are also “on-demand” services ranging from 29p for a music video to £2.99 for a movie.
We decided to go for the just Value Pack costing just £14 per month.
The actual ordering process was pretty seamless. The site checks if you have BT Vision availability and if you do you can then proceed with the order. It was slightly weird that we had to enter our direct debit details again and we’ll have to see if this is a separate bill to our Landline & BT Broadband bill.
We then selected a date and time slot when we wanted to the engineer to visit and install our set top box. Date availability is usually 1 week after ordering and provides you with various slots (AM or PM). We decided to go for a weekend AM slot at no extra charge. Once booking the engineer visit we got our confirmation reference and the order process completed. Pretty easy!
So there we have it. We’ll be expecting our engineer to arrive anytime between 9am and 12pm on the 29th September.
I already have a couple of concerns about how my experience. Hopefully they won’t come true but it’s always fun to predict what might go wrong!
- Picture quality (i.e pixelation) is sub standard due to the low broadband quality of service (QoS)
- Picture stability (i.e. can it hold a stable frame rate) is sub standard due to low broadband quality of service (QoS)
- The V Box (Set Top Box) may be unstable, slow response and could freeze from time to time
- TV Service unavailability
- Poor Customer Service (i.e. high abandon rate, long waiting times, issues not resolved first time)
- Provisioning Process may be delayed - Engineer may need to come back another time due to installation issue
See you in PART 2!