Saturday, September 09, 2006

DishTV India - A Bad experience

In response to "Dish TV or Triple Play", here is a bad consumer experience and review of Zee's DishTV quality of service and customer satisfaction.

It took 15 days and numerous phone calls to the shopkeeper, service center, Zee head office, n number of sales people, technicians to get them to come over to my home and install the DISH TV antennae. DISH TV phone helpdesk standard response was that they don’t handle setups and I should talk to the dealer. Dealer said talk to service center. Service center said they’re sending the guy and never sent him.

This was not the end of it..now another week passed before the maxi service got activated. This too after tons of phone calls where I was always told it would be taken care of, but never happened.

Now the BIG shock….I expected good quality Video, somewhere near DVD quality since this being digital n all….No such luck…this is a majorly compressed MPEG2 video feed !! It is worse than VCD quality. Sound is near MONO unless you use headphones. I thought that signal strength maybe causing this, but I had 75-76% signal, which DISH TV tech said was the max he had seen himself. people usually get 60-65%.

Damn !! My cable looked and sounded so much better with full bandwidth, and this DTH looked like small video clip made full screen on my 29 inch TV. I guess it’s passable on smaller 21′’ screens but looks bad and patchy on a 29′’.

My advice…don’t go for this DTH hype till they improve their service.
P.S. another thing…they recently did a software upgrade and dumbed down the set top box. now you cannot make any system changes and can’t even see the signal strength. The channel surfing has also become a pain..instead of quickly shifting between screenful of channel menu, now I have to scroll through each and every channel to reach the desired channel. Their telephone support says there is no way to go back to the old firmware. They claim this new one is very user friendly. How is it user friendly when the users don’t like it?? their active channels are just marketting hype to attract new customers comparing their service with TATA SKY. No one watches their silly active patchwork.

I don’t know about TATA SKY but DISH TV will give you that cheap “quantity and no quality” feeling that reliance CDMA phones gave. I don’t think TATA SKY would be any different.

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