I have used Sun Direct for 1.5 months. Currently I'm using Tata Sky, please refer post #32 for the Tata Sky EPG information for the programs mentioned by you at the same timings. In fact, Tata Sky even mentions the episode numbers and says if it's a repeat telecast.
It is good to know that Tata Sky's EPGs one ups Sun Direct's EPGs. That was why I was skeptical and did not get into the details of their EPGs. It is only fair that they do this, as they seem to be the DTH who charge the highest when it comes to HD boxes with recording facility (albeit with 3 tuners, which completely eliminates Sun Direct's recording restriction, which restricts channel switching to only between channels in the same transponders while a recording is already going on).
While I appreciate Sun Direct trying to present the latest EPG information to the users all the time, the main problem here is, it is blank 70% of the time for random channels. My use case is this. I would be watching a particular channel, for instance Star Movies HD and just click the right arrow button to see what movie is running on HBO HD or Pix HD. I don't even get to a point of reading the description of the movie here. Sun Direct fails in the first step. It shows blank most of the times for this use case. And this NOT only happens just after switching the set-top box on, it happens ALL the time even after watching TV for 3-4 hours continuously.
Well, based on my experience with the latest model STBs (Y Series for HD and S32100 for SD), this has not been the case at all. And
blank for 70% of the time seems to be
highly inaccurate to me. Again, please refer to my earlier post wherein I had explained how the EPG for a channel may be seemingly blank, but it loads itself after a minute or two after we switch to that channel for the first time (after we had switched on the STB). If it does not load even after switching to a channel, switching one channel forward/backward also helps in such instances, which helps to quickly load the EPG for the channel (or set of channels) in question. This helps even if we had the STB on for 3 to 4 hours like you mentioned, but were watching different channels than the channel(s) in question.
In the 1.5 months you used Sun Direct, I do remember that you switched from the newest STB model you had when you initially bought Sun Direct and went back to use the
older N Series box in order for it to display the subtitles for the HBO HD channel. Based on how you are mentioning that you pressed the
right/left arrows in order to view the EPGs of channels you were currently not watching, I suspect bulk of these EPG issues you were facing could have occurred because of the older N Series box. Because, with the newer model HD STBs, if I am recollecting it correctly (anyone using Y/U Series boxes, correct me if I am incorrect here), I believe we cannot use the right/left arrows to view other channel EPGs. It only increases/decreases the volume like it does in the latest SD boxes.
Do you think this could have been the root cause of the heavy EPG issues you were facing? For what it's worth, like I had mentioned in my previous post, in addition to the
English Entertainment channels, I myself am a more than a fairly regular user of the
English Movie channels and
Sports channels. And I have faced EPG issues for, say, only 5% to 10% of the times while watching these channels. And even that has been very very rare. So, while I certainly cannot vouch for my own regional (Tamil) channels, I most certainly can vouch for the availability of EPGs and their accuracy when it comes to English Entertainment, English Movies, Sports and English GEC channels (in that order) of Sun Direct.
Other, longtime Sun Direct users (both HD & SD) in this forum, could a few of you chime in and clarify me and
@Siva on what could be the reason behind these two completely different viewpoints when it comes to the availability of EPGs in Sun Direct? Because, all I can deduce is that there was very little data & time to assess, in addition to switching back to an older model STB during the said period of 1.5 months of Sun Direct usage.
I just could not cope up with this because I have never faced such scenario in Airtel. I always used to get the program name that is running on another channel while watching one. And even now on Tata Sky, this never happens. EPG always shows the program name and it's perfectly fine.
To talk more about Airtel, frankly speaking I mostly watched English Movies, Sports and Telugu Regional HD channels. And for the 8 years I have used Airtel, I have not faced any issue with EPG being blank, it always displayed the correct movie name in English movie channels.
Again, like I had explained in detail in my earlier post, even though Airtel DTH seemingly displays the EPGs alright, it completely fails to me -- because of the very basic, generic descriptions of the programs when it comes to their detailed description area. While I agree that Airtel DTH always displays
a EPG for all channels, their inner program descriptions themselves are not accurate 80% of the time. So, that is a huge downer for me.
On the other hand though, Tata Sky seems to be leading in this department. I mean, for example, like I can see in your screen shots, displaying
Season and
Episode numbers with indication of
repeat telecasts is a huge huge plus if you are a regular viewer of
English Entertainment channels. So, good for you that you now own a Tata Sky connection!
Thank you for reading
