Thats your point of view.
"No one watches cable for the shows now. "
Myself included, I know a TON of people who dont regularly watch a bunch of sports. We will watch the occasional hockey game, but beyond that, we watch a lot of other stuff (from kids programming, wifes reality tv, etc).
Each person in what they want to watch, etc will vary... so the best choices for them may vary as well.
Like the others above, I dont work for Rogers either.
For me, on the content that I watch, its the same, if not better. (again, thats not much sports). But that includes high action, where there would be a lot of motion, etc.
But like the old boxes, there is a lot of potential things that can cause the signal to go wrong and drop quality. Wifi (and wifi interference, etc).. the fastest internet package is no good if that signal is flakey or from there to the box is not 100%.
I have even seen weird things from other users on here which come even from settings. Leaving the display on AUTO and not forcing to 1080 (or 4k, etc).
Not saying its a perfect product.. nor not necessarily the right product for everyone.
But there are users on here that have had the opposite experience.
@Stephen2321 I believe you. I've seen absolutely HORRIBLE Ignite TV picture quality, early 2019, in a few Rogers stores of all places! (e.g. I watched a Raptors game; the picture was fuzzy and there were "ghosts" around each player on the court. Movies looked worse than VCR quality. Scrolling text (financial tickers) on news channels were janky and fuzzy. For some reason, Ignite TV was streaming at a low bitrate, hence the poor quality.) This isn't normal. My Ignite TV picture quality is on par (slightly better in some ways, slightly worse in others) with Digital TV.
Bell fibe boxes.. other than the main one.. are all wifi as well.
Sounds like if you were going down to that picture quality, is that there was a signal drop.
Either with the wifi itself, or signal to the boxes. Both could be tweeked. (though, again, likely was a BOTCHED install where all this should have been done at the beginning)
Myself, I maybe on time a month have seen a signal drop (slight picture quality drop).
One thins as well, I have seen a few people now having some quality issues, where the box was having issues when the picture setting was set to AUTO. Like wasnt handshaking properly all the time. Changing the picture setting to a fix setting, would fix it for them.
@Belisarius This thread isn't representative of all Ignite TV users; the posts here are highly skewed by those who have been plagued by bad Ignite TV installations. Occasionally, you'll find a few, like me, who have had a very good experience and take the time to share that.
By contrast, my Fibe TV experience was so poor that, over the years, I've had STITCH engineers assigned to me on multiple occasions and the problems still could not be fixed. The HomeHub 3000 is a train wreck. Bell's Fibe TV firmware has also been plagued with bugs (in my opinion, v2.4 was their last solid release) and they've gone unfixed because MediaRoom is now a legacy platform. It didn't help that Ericsson also spun off their IPTV division to "MediaKind". Two years ago, Bell announced that they would be transitioning to the new MediaFirst platform... and this still has not happened yet. When this finally does roll out, the new Fibe TV will have a lot more in common with Ignite TV.
Re: Bell's wireless support, there's nothing magical about it. It's 5GHz Wi-Fi. The VAP2400 has an 802.11n chipset; the VAP3400 supports 802.11ac. The VAP units are still affected by channel conflicts with neighbouring Wi-Fi but don't provide any configuration UI whatsoever, so you can't assign Wi-Fi channels manually when required. However, their setup does have some advantages: it's dedicated to providing wireless connectivity for the set-top boxes. The VAP units and the VIP2502 also provide wireless signal strength indicators on the front panel, so you can visually see if the signal is strong or if the signal strength fluctuates due to interference. The VAP's indicator shows the signal strength of the weakest connection. The customers and techs don't need to rely on any special tools to optimize the placement of equipment.
As for a local vs cloud PVR, both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages. I actually don't find much difference in the response time. What I do miss is the 90 minutes of content that it buffers, and that the buffer is used by ALL set-top boxes that are tuned to that same channel. It's also nice that if you start watching a program from the beginning but decide that you want to continue watching later, you can hit Record and you're able to record the entire program from the beginning. I also REALLY miss "List" view: with Ignite TV, it's a royal pain browsing through 1000 Crave Movies/HBO titles in the "All Movies" catalogue 6 titles at a time.
With Ignite TV, I don't have to worry about losing all of my shows when the PVR dies, nor do I have to deal with the headaches of returning/replacing PVRs (until I finally get one that works) because of rental gear that gets cycled through the system countless times and doesn't get fixed during refurbishment.
With Ignite TV, the unified view of broadcast, PVR, On-demand and Netflix content is nice, especially when you want to binge-watch a TV series. Bell can't (currently) do that, nor do they have Voice Command and Voice Search, which is not as gimmicky as I initially thought it was.
I also find Ignite TV's picture quality to be better most of the time. In order for Bell to be able deliver multiple streams over VDSL, they downconvert most content to 720p and then compress it as much as possible. With any IPTV service, the picture quality is limited by the quality of the encoders that are used. With Ignite TV customers having Internet bandwidth that's 150Mb/s or higher, Rogers does not have to be as aggressive with their compression.
Ignite TV really is a good service. That's not always reflected by the comments here... but at least Rogers provides an open forum where their customers can discuss issues and concerns, and get additional support from other users.
Hello @Kidbd7,
We're sorry to hear that you've been a bit disappointed in your service as of late, that's never good. 😕
Although you are correct about our no longer offering live streaming of radio stations, we do still offer quite an array of Stingray channels for our Ignite TV service! You can find these on channels 365-424, respectively.
As another alternative, you can also look into downloading the Radioplayer Canada app which has been receiving quite a buzz.
I hope this is helpful! 🙂
RogersLaura
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