Too much to say

Unsurprisingly I find myself with too much to say. Perversely this has resulted in me actually blogging nothing for over a week. My thought process about what to blog had been: BT Vision Review, Cult of "New" or Pain of the Early Adopter, Moore's Law of Exponential Micro-Processor Evolution, The Law of Accelerating Returns by Kurzweil, The First Person that will live for 1000 years has already been born.  It's like "Surfing the Brain".

So let's start at the beginning.

Recently we moved home and this provided an opportunity to rationalise three essential modern services. Fixed line telecoms, broadband internet and pay2view TV. These 3 services between them were responsible for more than I cared to admit of our monthly outgoings.

We had Sky HD with loads of add-ons, BT 8MB business broadband and most of our phone calls were on the O2 mobile account from our iPhone's prepaid monthly calls. The "full service" options were Sky, O2, Virgin and BT. For various reasons and despite my misgivings about BT customer service, we opted for the BT package. Customer service has been the worst I have ever experienced - well maybe the Biroska shop in Soviet Moscow in 1984 - no BT still occupy that nadir, nothing can go lower. The cost saving has been good if they actually credit back all the errors in billing that have occurred!

So finally the review of BT Vision:

The device that is provided is an uninspiring receiver/recorder box for freeview TV but additionally you can access TV programmes over the broadband selecting from a whole array of past series. Unfortunately this selection is quite limited and programmes don't seem to be available in perpetuity. Also HD is only on very limited "download" availability and is not able to be live streamed. As a concept then BT Vision is a prelude to the future. Being able to pay for what you view - or use credits - and to chose a specific programme from a backlog of all those produced is clearly a fairer way to bill and a more empowering way to engage with visual media. In actuality though it is a mere shadow of what it could be, I'd wait until more early adopters (like me) have beta tested it and the bandwidth has improved in the UK.