Could be much improved

The final straw was the fan noise, more than any of the other boxes I have and coming on about every 10 minutes for around 4 minutes. I am still fortunate to have acute hearing which is a disadvantage in this case with 2 boxes over 3 days; the length my contract lasted before cancellation.

This is a shame as it all could be much better. The first box needed 2 factory resets before I received most of the Freeview (see later) channels and had to change the aerial configuration from that which on all the other Freeview devices around the house. I asked the BT Engineer who came with the second box on day 3 about this and a poor RF front end has been a problem.

It may be obvious but as well as an IPTV receiver, it is NOT a Freeview one and has its own propriety Guide where the only option is to extend the initial end time by 5 minutes. I did not have the boxes long enough to see how well or not this worked.

SD picture quality via HDMI wasn’t bad but not as good as on my Freeview Panasonic TV or Humax PVR. The 4 HD channels (851 – 854) seem to be provided via IPTV so I assume the box does not decode MPEG4. These were OK but again not as good as my Freeview Panasonic TV or Humax PVR. Picture quality on the IPTV SD channels was poor and akin to VHS. The 2 BT Sport HD test channels were much better but not up to good HD quality. SuperHD from Netflix shows what can be done in this respect.

All in all for the saga, I was about 2 hours on the phone to BT being cut off 3 times and it was only Sean in customer options who saved the day and cancelled my contract. Before this, the line was I cannot cancel the contract/reject the box for a noisy fan and would only be allowed to try the YouView box version if I paid £299 so that is the end of BT Vision.

On a bright BT note, I have had BT Infinity 2 installed with a good Openreach modem and BT Home Hub 4 router. I give 5 Stars for this service.

Hope this helps and if anyone from BT reads this, please take note.