Opponent

Morning All,

I rang du this morning to enquire about their tv packages but they weren’t to clear. So if somebody is with du hope they can shed some light.

I want to get Showtime family in the living room as well as the bedroom. Does that mean I have to pay 175 for the monthly subscription and 30 for the decoder for the living room and 45 for the monthly subscription and 30 for the decoder in the bedroom.

Seems extortionately expensive

Thanks

Eeyore

Something like that. You get "up to 75% discount" for additional subscriptions for other rooms in the house, but AFAIK you'll only get the full 75% if you're buying the most expensive package.

Welcome to the market where monopolies still rule

To be fair, things have improved slightly. When we first came out here in 2005, Du's 2Mb broadband service cost nearly £100 per month. They dropped the price a year or two back, but it's still ridiculously expensive (and slow) compared to just about any other country.

deemi786

or setup a slingbox from back home, thats what i have done and its ready to connect to in Dubai, luckily my parents didnt mind as they had a spare satellite dish in another room doing nothing.

I had a look at the channels available and they didnt look very good for the amount of money ill be spending.

Eeyore

Even better is simply to download everything you want to watch. Much better quality than Slingbox, all the adverts already cut out, and no monthly TV subscription cost

deemi786

if there were 8meg-20meg downloads available i would do that too but cant be bothered to wait for them to download, i know i can load them up onto utorrent but i generally like downloading .mkv's which are generally allot bigger and are HD quality so waiting time would be an issue, streaming isnt too bad....

Eeyore

The video streaming from the BBC iPlayer is acceptable, but I've never been impressed by Slingbox. Neither is as good as a typical standard-def XviD encode. Plus, for Slingbox to be any use at all, you need a PVR at the UK end, otherwise due to the time difference you're obviously having to watch all the good UK evening stuff in the very late evening/wee small hours of the morning over here - and if you're going to record stuff on a PVR and watch it at a more convenient time, you might as well download it anyway and get the benefits of better picture quality and all the adverts already removed.

deemi786

Its just the waiting thats an issue for me......

Jmover

we are just going through the process of taking out tv subscription with Du - where can we find a list of what the different channels they offer actually comprise??? i haven't yet come across a tv listing guide. can you please point me in the right direction??

also - i thought you couldn't get the BBC i player overseas? - can you download stuff from the bbc here?? if so, how???

many thanks in advance

Jmover

Eeyore

Go here, then scroll down to the bottom of the page, where you'll see three tabs marked "Orbit", "Showtime" and "Channel list". If you click on any of those you'll get the option to download a PDF of the channels.

You can use the iPlayer to access radio programmes anywhere in the world, but you need a way of giving yourself a UK IP address to access the TV programmes. There are easy ways of doing this, but we don't discuss them publicly, just in case

Jmover

thanks for the advice.