DialogTV vs SLT PeoTV

This article does not wish to market any SLT or Dialog products by any means.

I have been a consumer of DialogTV and SLT PeoTV for some time now. We have PeoTV at home and DialogTV at my uncle's. Since some people have asked me about their qualities (specially about PeoTV) I thought of putting an article comparing the user experience you will get. I will not discuss about their monthly rentals or initial costs or whatever because there are official ways to get them.

Another thing to mention is that these details are gained from my experience. The details may vary for you or other customers.

Installation

DialogTV

As you may know, DialogTV uses a dish antenna and the receiver unit located near your television will get the signal from it. The receiver unit have several video-outs to be received by a television or any display device. Recently, guys from Dialog came and they replaced our receiver unit with a different model. This model basically sucks! It has old-style menus and the previous one was very user-friendly than the new one. I don't know why this happened but if you have a simillar story please do tell in the comments section.

PeoTV

PeoTV needs an ADSL connection to operate though the receiver unit is not directly connected to the telephone line. The receiver has an ethernet port where you can give an output from an ADSL router. Assuming you have another computer at home, both the computer and the receiver can be connected to the router. When we bought PeoTV they provided a 4-port router. But that router model has very limited capabilities compared to a usual D-Link or Prolink router we use. As I remember, its make is UTStarcom.

Startup Time

Both DialogTV and PeoTV has an initial delay to display the TV channel on screen. For DialogTV, this is only a single phase. You switch on the device, it scans the signal then it starts displaying video.

For PeoTV, there are two delays. Assuming you haven't connected to internet already, the router needs some time to connect to internet through ADSL. Then the receiver unit needs some time to connect to the PeoTV server and begin downloading channel menus and the video stream.

Intial delay for PeoTV appears significantly larger than the delay of DialogTV.

User Experience

This is the most important aspect of any commercial product, but there are significant shortcomings of PeoTV in this area.

Navigation in Channel Menus

Basically the PeoTV receiver unit is an internet video streaming device. It connects to the video server through internet and display video outputs on the TV screen. Channel menus are merely web pages (and poorly designed ones too) which takes ages to load. I know this because some times it displays "Web page unavailable offline" error message on the TV screen. Even when the menu is fully displayed it's very hard to navigate and select channels. The device is very slow to respond to key presses from the remote. For example, when you press the arrow key it takes like half-a-second to move the selection rectangle to the next item. It's like browsing the internet in a very slow computer!

Before you jump into any wrong conclusions, I have to say there's no problem with our ADSL connection. It operates really fast as expected when browsing the internet and we can watch YouTube videos straight away without waiting for buffering.

Jumping Between Channels

As most of us do, another way to change channels is by using the Channel Up-Down keys on the remote. This is faster than going to the channel menu since there's no need to load and display a web page. You just jump straightly to another channel. Although this is possible on PeoTV, the device literary gets stucked if you do it too much! By "too much" I mean the normal usage pattern of any user. We tend to change channels frequently and we don't have to think about the strain it puts on the device!

You don't have problems like this in DialogTV. When you need to change the channel you go to menu and just change it. That's it. It very much responsive than PeoTV.

Video Quality

There's not much to whine about video picture quality in PeoTV. In fact it is pretty good. There's an initial shuttering for few seconds just after you switch to a channel but that's excusable since the video stream needs some time to be buffered.

With DialogTV you have these occasional glitches of squares appearing and stucked video which is pretty annoying. This maybe due to effects of the ionosphere on the singal transmitted from the sattelite. Other than that, the experience is the same as PeoTV.

Time-Shift TV

This is a facility solely provided by PeoTV. Despite all other shortcomings, PeoTV can get ver useful with this facility. Time-Shift allows you to go back in time (up-to 48 hours) and watch any program that was telecasted within the last 48 hours. You get fast-forward and rewind capabilities when you are watching anything. Even if you are watching a live cricket match you can rewind the video and watch the places you missed. (Of course you CANNOT fast-forward into future!)

There's no alternative provided by DialogTV for this facility.

My Favorite Channels

This part is fairly personalized. Some of my favorite channels are missing from PeoTV. Although Discovery and National Geographic are available on both, I miss AXN, Pogo and ZeeCafe from PeoTV. PeoTV does not provide any other channels worth watching either.

Conclusions

Considering all these facts, it seems DialogTV provides a better user experience. On the other hand, PeoTV provides the time-shift facility which maybe loved by some users. In short, DialogTV is simple and responsive while PeoTV is complex and bloated. This is a good example showing that when we incorporate more and more featured high-tech devices into our lives, we have to face the overhead they puts on us. Nor DialogTV, nor PeoTV is as simple as classic television we get from the good-old RF antenna!

Please put your experience on the comments section.

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Update

There's another very disturbing fact about PeoTV. If you have both PeoTV and ADSL, you HAVE to use the same crappy router they are providing to access internet as well. If you plug your own router, you will be able to access ADSL, but PeoTV won't work. PeoTV receiver unit requires the provided router in order to access PeoTV server.

This is inexcusible since their so called router has very limited functionality. It requires "dialing" (PPPoE) to connect to internet which has few drawbacks including single-user limitation and lack of support on Linux platforms! So if you are a heavy internet user with multiple computers you might be better off with DialogTV.