Sky HD own goal as 30% of installations hit by problems

[BGonaSTICK]

SATELLITE group BSkyB is facing the prospect of reprogramming upwards of 100,000 high-definition television boxes after it emerged that an estimated three in 10 customers are experiencing glitches.

Sky and some television manufacturers are widely believed to have rushed out their HD services in time for the World Cup, with sales of HD Ready televisions in the UK topping £250 million in May alone.

They now face angry complaints from their first wave of customers about lost sound, picture freezes and background noise, which could take “months” to sort out. Since the opinion of the so-called early adopters is vital to drive the growth of any new consumer product, this will be seen as a potentially serious blow.

Chris Wynn, a new media analyst at Informa, said: “If Sky can resolve this quite soon, they can minimise the damage, but it’s probably more costly in terms of bad publicity.”

The Sunday Herald understands that Pioneer sets are affected, together with a number of other manufacturers. At least three in 10 sets are said to be having difficulties, and it looks probable that both Sky and the affected manufacturers will have to re- engineer their software.

Intellect, the trade association for high-tech manufacturers, has called a meeting between its members and Sky to discuss solutions in several weeks’ time. As one industry source said: “It is certainly serious enough for us to call an extraordinary meeting”.

Sky certainly does not need any more trouble with HD television. It has already had installation hold-ups with HDTV in the run-up to the World Cup, which were caused by shortages of boxes. Even now, customers are still having to wait more than a month to make the switch.

With Freeview breathing down its neck and NTL apparently resurgent after its takeovers of Telewest and Virgin Mobile, Sky is relying on HD as one of its main growth drivers over the next couple of years.

HDTV offers pictures four times as sharp as ordinary television, and Sky has been marketing it aggressively. It is not releasing exact subscriber numbers at this stage, but they are already thought to have risen in excess of 100,000 since the May launch.

The new problems at least partly concern the system of copy protection (HDCP) that is built into HD Ready televisions to prevent piracy. For reasons still unknown to Sky or the manufacturers, this system appears to cause a recognition failure sometimes when signals are sent from the HD boxes, leading to an error message.

Sky insists it is only aware of a very few isolated instances of this happening with certain models of Pioneer televisions, and says it is working with the manufacturer to solve the problem. Industry sources, however, say that some other manufacturers are experiencing similar problems.

To make this worse, nobody has worked out the exact cause and it is not unique to specific models. All that is known is that when difficulties arise, it tends to be when viewers switch between high-definition and standard-definition programmes or between widescreen and conventional pictures.

With customers paying £300 for the HD boxes, plus an extra £10 per month on top of subscriptions which often exceed £40, Sky is emphasising that even those with this HDCP problem can still use the boxes by plugging them into their analogue socket (component output). These require different cables, but it is thought that Sky is providing them.

The trouble with using the analogue port is that the picture quality is slightly weaker and there is nothing to stop viewers making high-quality pirate copies of whatever they are watching on high-definition.

Sky does concede that there is sometimes an alternative issue with picture freezing, but it says this is related to how different models of television handle the switch between standard and HD channels and nothing to do with its boxes or HDCP.

A spokesman said: “It’s not something that Sky has any control over. It’s something that perhaps manufacturers could address.”

A spokeswoman for Pioneer said that only a small number of her company’s televisions were affected, although there was no pattern with models.

She said: “We are working with Sky and have been running tests for the last few weeks to try and resolve the problem, but we can’t seem to resolve it at all at the moment.”

It is thought unlikely that Sky or the manufacturers will have to recall their products to fix any problems. The most likely solution will be a software upgrade that can be downloaded to customers’ homes, although it is thought that that could take several months.

Source: Sunday Herald