I can now brag about this, on October the 10th 2009 I became the first person in Malaysia to have the Astro B.yond HD decoder installed…and I had to keep it secret!
BTW my installer had a van not a submarine.
I was and still am a beta tester of the new box and I work for Astro but I wasn’t expecting to be the first person to get it! Not even the Chief Technology Officer, the man that had championed the entire project, had even had the box installed in his house yet (he got it the next day). He called me up on that day to ask how it was I said “awesome!”.
That 1st day I sat at home and watched National Geographic HD with Dolby 5.1 and I was the only person watching. Wow all that money just for me, well for a day anyway! We had no other channel then Nat Geo HD to view back then but I never got bored of the detail that we were broadcasting. I have a scheduling and promo back ground so I was well impressed with the Nat Geo channel ID promos and the “look” of the channel. Nat Geo have always been great at channel branding and to see them do it in HD is brilliant.
A side from HD what really sets this new B.yond decoder apart from anything we’ve done before is the navigation of the EPG. Our old ugly and slow thing is gone and now a new cool looking, easy to use and hyper fast one is here. In fact it is so fast we had to slow it down from the default setting as we found too many of us were so use to the old decoders speed that we double hit buttons all the time. Even now I see some comments on line from people doing the same, believe me you’ll get use to the speed in a couple of days and won’t be able to handle ever going back to an old box.
Another thing that was amazing was how nothing leaked about this project until we released it to the press! Everyone knows that TMnet is doing an IPTV release and they should have already launched by now according to the first reports. It goes without saying the IPTV will do HD we never knew that we would beat them to it. Frankly I hope they do launch soon, nothing benefits the customer more then competition and while we might have the satellite rights that doesn’t mean you can’t deliver a pay TV service over other means. Anyway enough of that
So I’ll blog some things about the new B.yond box over the next days . I’ll share experiences and give tips and pointers.
In the mean time check out the website
http://www.astro.com.my/byond/index.asp
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