The end of the affair

As I’ve written about before, the demise of the 4TV programme guide has left owners of several brands of Freeview recorders without an easy way to schedule recordings. And now, I think, we can say that the coffin lid has been pretty well nailed down, and the chances of a resumption of the EPG service are pretty much extinguished.

I’ve said before that I think it would be unlikely, despite the online petition (which now stands at around 1500 signatures), that anyone would step in and take over the service. So why am I even more certain? Because of Sony.

As mentioned in some of the comments to stories on this site, and elsewhere, Sony told the owners of their SVR-S500 that they were “looking into the matter” and some people gained the impression they might consider taking over the EPG service (though given they no longer run their own TVTV EPG on Freeview, that would have been an odd decision).

What makes that look even less likely is this email, sent to an SVR-S500 owner (I’ve removed identifying information):

Thank you for your recent e-mail received on 09/07/2010 08.00 AM.

Thank you for contacting Sony regarding your Sony SVR-S500.

In recent weeks we have been contacted by a number of customers with reference to the loss of EPG service on their SVR-S500 Freeview recorder.

This loss of service is, very basically, due to the EPG data stream, specific for this product, no longer being broadcast as of the 29th June.

Since this date, the electronic programme guide will now only display the ‘Now’ and ‘Next’ information; where before it would display up to 8 days of programme lists.

As a result, we are aware that you will no longer be able to see forthcoming programmes or use the EPG to record them in advance. However all other functions will continue as before, with the product still able to display the Freeview broadcast and record programmes via the manual timer function.

However, with the change in service firmly in mind, we have put in a place an offer to give you the option to trade-in your SVR-S500 and get £100 off of one of the following Freeview HDD/DVD recorders:

RDR-DC200

RDR-DC100

Details of these models and their full features and specifications can be found on www.sony.co.uk. Please note however that new ranges do not feature twin Freeview tuners but these products do come with built in DVD recorders which is an added benefit.

If you wish to participate in the trade-in, you can either do this by contacting our Sony Centre Sales line on 0845 6000 124 (select option 1) where they can arrange for you to reserve and collect the new product via your local Sony Centre, or, you can visit your local Sony Centre directly. The offer will run from midday on 29 July. Details of your nearest Sony Centre can be found via www.sonycentres.co.uk. Please note you will need to return the SVRS500 to the Sony Centre to obtain the discount.

I hope that this offer helps you with the current situation.

I’ve called the number in that email to verify the offer, and it is indeed correct – select option 1 first, then option 3 from the next menu; the person I spoke with told me you have to have registered with the support line first to let you know there’s a problem, but they’ll be able to transfer you.

Sony's offer to SVR-S500 PVR owners: £100 off a new Freeview+ DVD/hard disk recorder

You can see the specs for the RDR-DC200 and RDR-DC100 on the Sony web site; they’re single tuner Freeview+ units with a DVD recorder; the DC100 has a 160GB hard drive, and the DC200 a 250GB drive.

So, if Sony are handing out discounts and arranging trade-ins of their affected PVRs, I think it’s fair to say that they’re not going to be suddenly starting up an EPG service for even fewer people, especially when the majority of those people will probably not even be their customers.

And, I think this is the final nail in the coffin because the other companies involved don’t have a presence in the UK market for PVRs at the moment. Sony is the only company that would perhaps have suffered from goodwill issues if nothing was done, and so they’re addressing that – and good on them for making an offer. The replacement products might not be exactly what you want, but £100 is a pretty reasonable deal, in my opinion.

The only other company that might really be in a position to do something about restarting the EPG is Beko – and while those who are online and reading about this issue will know of their involvement, I suspect that the vast majority of people affected aren’t aware at all. As I’ve commented before, would you be more likely to buy a Beko fridge, if the guide reappeared on a Thomson or Digifusion PVR?

I don’t think so – and so I don’t think Beko will view this as their problem at all. If there was ever going to be a resumption of the EPG, then Sony would have been the best bet. And their offer to affected customers suggests that they’ve done the sums, and decided a trade-in scheme is far more cost-effective than buying capacity, licensing an EPG, and paying someone to transmit it. They got out of that business in the UK with TVTV, and leaping back in for an obsolete product was never likely to happen.

So, unless something unexpected happens, I think that’s the end of the 4TV affair.

Bitrates on FreeviewHD

One of the assertions often found around the internet is that FreeviewHD must be compromised, because there’s not much bandwidth available. It’s true that there’s less capacity than there is on satellite (though for other reasons, there aren’t as many free HD channels there as people might like). But in watching Freeview HD, I have been pleasantly surprised with the picture quality, both from the tuners in TV sets and from stand-alone set top boxes connected via HDMI.

The question that lots of people have been asking is “What’s the bitrate of the channels.” The easiest way to answer that question would be with a PC tuner card, which would let you see the instantaneous rates; unfortunately, there aren’t any available at the moment, which rules that out.

So, I’ve done the next best thing, which is to look at a selection of recordings from the BBC and ITV that I made on the Digital Stream Freeview HD PVR that I’ve just been testing for Register Hardware. I’m afraid that, since nothing actually caught my eye on Channel 4, there aren’t any recordings from that in the list below.

The Freeview HD multiplex is broadcast using what’s called a variable bit rate, or VBR. The total bit rate available for all the HD channels on Freeview is around 40Mbits/second – which is better than was expected when the DVB-T2 system was being designed. The mux is set up so that each channel has a variable amount of capacity, of between 3 and 17Mbits/second. The VBR and statistical multiplexing works is by analysing the video stream, and a channel that needs more capacity, like a fast moving picture of a football match will get more of it than one that, for example, is showing a lovely picture of a painting in a gallery, which isn’t changing at all.

Headline figures

The figures used below are the reported duration and file sizes, as in the Digital Stream's media browser

So, how does it work out in practise? The headline figures for HD, based on looking at the duration and disk space indicated on the Digital Stream PVR, are that the BBC are using around 3.2GB per hour, while ITV is coming in at around 2.75GB per hour. I won’t directly convert those to the bit rate because it’s not quite so simple – not all the data in the file is video, for instance. Some is audio, and there may or may not be audio description too. And, of course, that gives you an average figure.

It’s also important to note that, since in my view ITV makes very few HD programmes worth watching, let alone recording, all the ITV recordings I made were at the same time, each week, and so all will have been affected to the same degree by what was on the other channels, assuming no major scheduling upsets. On the other hand, the BBC HD recordings were from a variety of times, though there are repeated recordings in there and, on the whole the bit rate doesn’t really change much.

For comparison, I also have a couple of SD recordings from the BBC, which are included in the list below.

Updated: 9th August, additional data added for ITV and Channel 4, plus some more BBC programmes.

BBC recordings

These, then, are the BBC recordings, with running time and disk space used.

• That Mitchell and Webb Glimpse, 850MB, 16’28”
• The Thick of It, 1.6GB, 30’3”
• Doctor Who, 2.7GB, 55’14”
• Mongrels, 1.6GB, 29’36”
• Mongrels, 1.6GB, 30’10”
• Mongrels, 1.6GB, 28’17”
• Great British Railway Journeys, 1.7GB, 29’24”
• Top Gear, 3.2GB, 1h 3’24”
• Sherlock, 3.6GB, 1h 29’46’
• FAQ about Time Travel, 3.3GB, 1h 20’17”
• Jonathan Creek, 4.6GB, 1h 35’13”
• Sherlock, 3.5GB, 1h 30’1”
• Doctors (SD, BBC1) 818MB, 30’9”
• BBC 1 (SD), 1.1GB, 41’19”

ITV HD recordings

• Identity, 2.8GB, 1h 0’4”
• Identity, 2.9GB, 1h 2’33”
• Identity, 2.6GB, 1h 0’31”
• Identity, 2.7GB, 1h 0’13”
• Three Kings, 8.6GB, 2h 10’37”
• Cry Wolf, 4.4GB, 1h 38’58”

Channel 4 HD recordings

• Misfits, 2.9GB, 1h 4’54”
• The Core, 7.2GB, 2h 34’53”
• Smallville, 2.4GB, 54’54”
• Hollyoaks, 1.5GB, 29’56”
• The Big Bang Theory, 1.2GB, 24’57”

From this, it looks like ITV are habitually using a slightly lower bit rate than the BBC, but that will of course depend on what’s scheduled against Identity, and the demands of those programmes on the bit rate. So, I’ll find some more HD material from ITV, and update this post with more figures, together with some from Channel 4, to give a more comprehensive overall picture.

Meanwhile, the other useful thing that you can learn from this is that, roughly, you’ll be able to record 100 hours of HD programming on a FreeviewHD PVR with a 320GB hard drive.

3View – 4TV is no cause for concern

When I wrote about the situation with the 4TV-based Freeview PVRs a couple of weeks ago, some readers made the assumption that, reading between the lines, I was suggesting people don’t buy equipment that hasn’t got the official Freeview or Freeview HD logo on the box, and given that the one box that’s eagerly anticipated by many but doesn’t have Freeview HD certification is the one from British start-up 3View, some readers might have drawn the conclusion that I was talking about them.

As I said in a comment to that post, I wasn’t specifically referring to anyone, and I’m certainly not going to tell people to make a decision one way or another about the 3View box when I’ve yet to play with it (I declined the offer of a pre-production unit, preferring to wait until the release version, with final firmware).

All that said, the cessation of the 4TV service and the problems caused for people left with no EPG on their device has made some people wonder about the wisdom of buying something that isn’t Freeview certified. So, I tackled that question head on earlier today, in a conversation with 3View’s Robert Blackwell.

Key facts

3View's box doesn't have the Freeview sticker on it - but does that really matter?

The most important message for people to bear in mind is that there isn’t really a chance of the sort of problems caused by the missing 4TV EPG affecting the 3View box. Although it’s designed from a fairly internet-centric point of view, with easy access to catch up services from the programme guide, it is also perfectly capable of working without an internet connection at all. It can use enhanced programme guides from the internet (which allow things like clicking on programmes to buy them on DVD, or accessing catch-up TV), or it can quite happily work with the standard Freeview broadcast EPG. So, whatever happens, you’ll have an EPG, from which you can set recordings.

And, 3View has already confirmed that the box will be able to access the EPG for Freeview’s HD channels, which has content controls, so you’ll be good for both HD and SD channels.

Online services

What of online services? While the core TV recording functionality is clearly able to continue whatever happens to 3View, the box promises lots of other neat tools and tricks. According to Blackwell, the online widgets are standard Opera widgets, so while 3View may have some available on their own site and through their own portal for you to add, it’s essentially an open system.

And, where you install a widget that accesses information from, say, the BBC News site, your box will be accessing that information directly. In other words, 3View isn’t running servers through which all the information reaching your box has to pass. So, again, even if they were to go the way of the 4TV guide, you wouldn’t lose out on services provided by other people – you’ll still have a box that can connect to and display online content.

So why not certify?

The Freeview logo: reassurance of compatibility? Or 'Just tv'?

The obvious question for many people, then, is why not certify? Wouldn’t the FreeviewHD logo provide people with some extra degree of reassurance?

Perhaps – but 3View’s Blackwell outlined some other reasons why not. With Project Canvas creating a new class of connected boxes with a powerful brand name, 3View feels that in the longer term the ‘Freeview’ label may be seen by consumers as meaning more basic boxes, lacking the online services that will assume a higher profile when Canvas (probably to be called YouView) launches next year.

Certification would also require the use of an MHEG system, which provides the ‘red button’ interactive features used by the BBC; while some people may miss those, Blackwell is confident that many of the functions will be able to be replicated through widgets – and for those who do want to access specific BBCi content, they’ll almost certainly have a TV that’s capable of displaying it anyway. And, in my own experience, MHEG can slow down boxes, and has been the cause of plenty of bugs in various PVRs over the years.

The Freeview label, in other words, is seen as potentially limiting the marketing options. 3View’s box is compliant with the key technical standards, like DVB-T2, and agreement to use the HD EPG as well as the ability to pick up the standard Freeview programme guide should ensure that whatever the fortunes of the company themselves, the boxes will carry on working just fine.

Can you trust reviews?

This is the last part of a four part posting, beginning with Everbody knows how reviews work

Part 3 – Selection bias

The question at the end is “Can you trust reviews.” I’d say yes you can – but of course you’ll be expecting me to say that.

I do hope, though, that I’ve given some fairly good reasons why the influence of advertisers is nowhere near as big as many people imagine it to be. The real issue is money – the simple need to actually make a living and pay for the roof over your head.

For a full time freelance, doing product reviews can be a pretty thankless task; as I mentioned, writing features can be a better way to make a living. I do a mix of the two – simple gadget reviews, plus features on specific areas about which I’ve decided to learn a lot of background (like digital TV), and related reviews.

Will an unpaid reviewer, or someone who’s not doing this to make a living do a better review? That really depends. If you’re doing it for love, and you have unlimited time to write 3000 words on a digital TV recorder, then good for you, and good for your readers. But I would dispute the assertion that an unpaid blogger must necessarily be more accurate and better informed than a professional writer.

A look around various blogs will find some that are, undoubtedly, excellent, written by people who are well informed, and spend time crafting detailed reviews. It will also find some that are shockingly partisan, and others that are barely literate.

On the whole, by virtue of employing editors and sub-editors, professionally written reviews will tend to read better; I don’t think that’s too contentious a point. Will they be more accurate? I’d say that they can be – where an editor commissions someone to write, because they have broad experience over many years, in a particular area, for example.

Are we all – both bloggers and professional writers – in thrall to PRs who let us keep shiny lovely gadgets? I don’t think so. Companies are far less generous than they used to be – and even in the past, most review kit that was particularly covetable was reclaimed, sooner or later.

Sure, I have cupboards with gadgets that time forgot – and that’s tended to be nothing to do with the review I wrote, but simply the march of progress. If a PR company wants back the broadband router than can’t even do ADSL2, they’re welcome – I need the space. It’s certainly not going to influence what I write about their next one.

If you think my living room is full of the latest AV gear, and fancy gadgets, it’s not. While many of us might take advantage of a press discount (though these days, you can often buy cheaper at places like Richer Sounds) if we’ve liked something, keeping a neat gadget just doesn’t tend to happen. Why would you write a good review of an indifferent product, just because you wanted to keep it?

Yes, we get to play with the latest fancy gadgets. No, on the whole, we don’t get to keep them. Sometimes, professional writers get to go on fancy trips – I went with Panasonic to their Convention in Munich earlier this year. I saw lots of new products, had a fun evening in a beer hall, and flirted with a cute PR guy.

Has it made me write better things about Panasonic products? Well, their TV came joint third in a roundup I wrote for Register Hardware, and I’ve been critical of other products they make, so if that was their plan, it doesn’t seem to have worked. Nor does that sort of thing, in my view, influence other writers I know.

I hope, at the end of this – admittedly rather long – piece, you’ll at least understand a bit more about how reviews work in the tech press, for the UK at any rate.

Of course advertisers have a role, but as I’ve explained, it’s a far, far smaller one than most people imagine.

Selection bias

Part 2 – The problems with reviews

You might – and I hope you will – accept by now that the finances are one of the main reasons for some reviews not being as good as you might like them to be. But still, there are questions about those pesky advertisers. Do they get more reviews than people who don’t, or better ones?

In the case of freelance reviews, the freelance simply won’t have a clue whether or not a company is advertising in a magazine, so it’s hard to see how that can affect their conclusions – and I don’t recall meeting enough freelances claiming “X changed my review and gave the product a higher rating” to make me think that happens systematically. Yes, a rating might occasionally be tweaked by an editor, but that’s often because the editor’s got knowledge of other comparable products, or feels the text doesn’t match up with the rating given.

No one has ever, in all my years, called up and said “Can you review this, and go easy on them,” let alone suggesting it’s because they’re an advertiser.

Even with in-house reviews, it doesn’t really happen. There’s not as much contact between advertising and editorial staff as some people imagine there to be, and a staff writer who’s told by the reviews editor “350 words on this, by Monday please” really isn’t likely to have a clue whether or not the product is from a potential advertiser or not. And again, in my experience, the commissioning editor doesn’t give the writer a line on what they want the review to come out like. I have been asked precisely once in almost 20 years to alter the tone of a piece – and that was to make a vox-pop piece more critical of a company, not less, by selecting different quotes.

Hang on, someone at the back is doubtless shouting, but don’t people who advertise win more awards? Impossible to say, with any certainty, and you run into a case of “post hoc ergo propter hoc,” which is to say that you can’t necessarily prove a causal link.

If a company advertises, and wins awards from a magazine, which came first? Do they advertise more in a magazine because they have an “Editor’s choice” logo that looks like an endorsement? Perhaps. Did they get that because they advertise? Most unlikely, in my experience, that there was a causal link.

However, I do accept that there is what could be called a ‘selection bias’ at times. That is that when someone on the ad sales team is speaking with a client, who mentions they have a new product, they’ll pass on the name of whoever commissions reviews. And, sometimes, when the reviews editor is hoping to get a product in from a company that they’ve not written about before, they might ask the advertising team if they have a contact name.

But does that ever extend to the ads team saying “can you do a good review of this? It’ll help us sell some pages” Again, in my experience the answer is no. There is a ‘selection bias’ in that contact with the ads department might make it more likely that the reviews editor knows of a product or company, and makes it stand out a little more from the mass of press releases vying for their attention.

Even then, that’s a long way from garnering a good review, just because someone advertises. As I mentioned before, in my experience, publishers will back an editor who upsets an advertiser.

Selection bias isn’t ideal – but it’s probably unavoidable, and of course it takes other forms too. As a reviews editor, you’ll get to know the various PR people, and you’ll get on better with some than with others. You’ll learn which ones can reliably get you a product first, or at short notice. And when someone else lets you down, you know that if you call up a particular company, they’ll be able to send you their latest PC or gadget, so that you can fill the half page gap that’s been left by someone else’s product being stranded in a volcanic ash cloud.

Part 4 – Can you trust reviews?

The problems with reviews

Part 1 – Everybody knows how reviews work

What about those bad reviews? Why didn’t the reviewer find the flaws that an experienced user would find in a few minutes?

It’s tempting for the casual observer to assume that everything wrong with product reviews must be to do with advertiser influence. But again, speaking from my own experience, that certainly isn’t the case.

However, the conditions under which reviews are written certainly does have an impact on their quality, so it’s worth looking at them.

Print media is having a bit of a bad time right now, to put it mildly, but aside from a few very well funded magazines, the IT press has never exactly been massively overstaffed. When I worked on Computer Buyer, the editorial team (that’s not counting the guys who do art, or the production desk) was me, a deputy editor, technical and features editors, and an editorial assistant – five people, including the assistant. Most work was done by freelances.

Around the same time, over at Personal Computer World, they had eight or nine, plus some testers in the labs; the by the time PCW was closed, the editorial office was four people, plus a labs team of one.

Meanwhile, on the freelance side of things, the rate that most magazines pay has not changed in years; I can’t remember the last time I chatted with a fellow freelance to be told that they’d had their rate increased. It’s more likely to have been the same for five years or more, and during that time, as the number of staff in magazine offices has decreased, freelances have had to take on more of the work, for the same money.

So, for example, a freelance will often be the person sourcing kit and pitching reviews to magazines. As well as writing the review, you’ll also have to sort out photography – either submitting PR shots with it, or taking your own, and seldom being paid for them. You may be expected to mark up the copy using a specific template, to save time on a smaller production desk. All these things would have been done in house in the past, by production teams and editorial assistants.

Follow the money

But surely, you cry, freelances are rewarded handsomely for their work, aren’t they? Well, not so much, actually. I won’t give exact figures, and they differ anyway from one publication to another. Typically, for a half page review in a print magazine like Personal Computer World, you’d earn less than £80. For a full page review, you might earn a little short of £200.

Sounds reasonable, on the face of it. Until you wonder “why did the reviewer miss that?” And you realise that, when you want to make a living out of this, you have to do a lot of work. For a half page review to make sense, you need to do it in a day – that’s playing with the kit, exploring its quirks, taking screenshots, and writing the copy.

If you’re reviewing something that’s problematic – perhaps there are clashes with drivers on your computer, or some weird issue you’ve discovered – what happens next? If you spend time tinkering, and calling technical support, and it runs to two days, then you’ve made £80 for sixteen hours work. That’s not even minimum wage – and that’s the biggest reason why there are errors with reviews.

You might have 350 words (or 750, for just under £200) to explain a product, to get over the idea of what it does, and why it might or might not be worth a look, and you need to get it done fairly swiftly, if you’re actually going to come out ahead, or you’d be better off flipping burgers.

There are solutions to this, of course. You’ll often see that one person has written a few reviews of a product, for different magazines or websites – it’s a good way to increase the return on the time you’ve spent testing something, and allow yourself more time. Everyone gets a better review as a result, and as a freelance you make more cash. It’s also worth mentioning here that some websites pay a flat fee for reviews that makes the amounts I’ve quoted here look extremely generous.

The other solution is to focus on specific areas, which is what I do. Find something you enjoy, you want to keep abreast of, and consider the time spent tinkering and toying time well spent, because it keeps you up to speed when you have to review a product – you know where to look for the main flaws, or quirks, or what to test for, because you’ve seen this sort of thing before. And, allied to this, write features. If you have in depth knowledge, writing features is, frankly, a better way to make a living than reviews, in my experience.

Part 3 – selection bias

Everybody knows how reviews work

As well as writing and editing stuff about gadgets, digital TV and computers, I spend a fair bit of time participating on various forums. And one of the assertions that I come up against time and time again is that “Everybody knows advertisers get good reviews.”

It’s a popular meme, oft repeated online, and sometimes with the assertion that bloggers must somehow be immune to this, compared to ‘traditional media,’ because they don’t rely on advertising. But I think that’s not necessarily the truth either.

Now, I’m not going to say that every single person out there doing product reviews is whiter than white; I don’t know them all, and I can’t vouch for them. But I can say, as someone who’s been writing for the computer press for just under 20 years, that I have never once come across a case where advertisers have influenced reviews. I’ll go a bit further than that. I have personal experience of them being rebuffed when they try to, and the way in which most reviews are commissioned today means there’s probably even less chance of it happening.

Plenty of people will doubtless say “but a review of product X didn’t mention glaring flaw Y, so it must be because they advertise.” I’m not going to excuse bad reviews, either – we all know they appear sometimes, and many of us have read a review of a product we own and thought “well, how did they miss that?” So it’s worth looking at – and the answer almost certainly isn’t that the advertisers have been leaning on someone.

It’s important to remember that I’m just talking about computer magazines here, on the whole. I started on Computer Buyer when it launched in 1991, and was editor for around 18 months before going freelance in the spring of 1995. I’ve written, at various times, for Active Home, AOL UK, Computer Active, Computer Shopper, Home Entertainment, Internet World, Mac User, PC Advisor, PC Plus, Personal Computer World, Register Hardware, T3, The Mac, The Register, VNUnet, Web User, What Mobile and What PC. I’ve done much more for some of those – like PCW – than others. But, generally, that’s a fair selection of the UK IT press.

First hand experience

Have I ever, even once, been asked to write a review that favours an advertiser, whether working as freelance or as staff? No, I have not.

Have I ever had an advertiser attempt to influence a review? One and a half times. The first was when I was Editor of Computer Buyer. As part of a group test of PCs, we included a system from a particular company, which I’ll call Brand X.

The staffer who wrote the review – for whatever reason – frankly didn’t do a good job. After it was published, we received a complaint from Brand X that there were factual errors – things like the brand of hard drive and CD drive were wrong. That was easy to verify when I took the machine apart myself (and yes, in an ideal world, you’d pay two people to do every test, and verify each other’s work. Let me know when you find a publishing company that rich, and I’ll come work for it.)

So, we accepted that there were errors, and we’d be happy to correct them. And we’d also be happy to run another review of a system from the supplier (which was nothing to do with them being an advertiser, but simply because I felt that a proper review would be better than an incorrect review, with corrections following a month or two later).

In principle, they agreed. I told them to send a PC for review, and I would send it to one of our freelance reviewers, who would know nothing of the situation, or of the conversations surrounding it, to ensure that they got a fair review. At which point, I was told “I don’t want a fair review, I want a good one.”

Naturally, I protested, and was told “Get XX (a specific person) to write a good review, or we’ll pull all our advertising.” I told them they could have a fair review, or nothing at all, and they said they’d pull their advertising. I told my publisher, who backed me up. They pulled their advertising, and then returned a few months later when they’d finished sulking.

The ‘half a time’ I mentioned? A freelance we used on a magazine I worked for did a good review of a product. The company let him keep the product afterwards, and later he pitched their next product as a review. I declined, and never commissioned him again.

So, there you have it, to set against your “everyone knows the advertisers call the shots” meme, some first hand experience, where they absolutely don’t. Is that enough to change your mind?

Part 2 – the problems with reviews