channel vision
Robert Kirby
Eager readers and Vivid decoder owners will by now have realised that, with their usual dogged enthusiasm, Sentech and the SABC have now entered the next stage of their disastrous satellite television broadcasting life cycle the one where they turn fully into a worm. As usual they are handling their newest debacle with all the finesse of a professional wrestler conducting a brain operation.
Readers may remember my writing about the smart cards that Sentech and the SABC had decided would be necessary for further reception of programmes via their famed Vivid digital decoders. Well, eventually these smart cards made their various ways to the Vivid customers, who installed them in their decoders only to find that, after a day or so, they failed. Not all the cards, just a good deal of them. Some lasted a day, some a week, some didn’t even start working. Something to do with the software of the decoder was to blame and the only remedy was to acquire new smart cards.
While waiting for their new smart cards to arrive, the Vivid customers had access to the so-called “temporary channels”. These are currently being shut down, smart cards working or not.
Worst hit with this and previous Sentech cock-ups has been the re-broadcast businesses set up by private enterprises in attempts to serve rural and far-flung communities with the full SABC/e.tv basket of merriment. What is done is that a municipality or community group purchases a redistribution set-up from a private company. This set-up includes sufficient Vivid decoders to haul in the programmes and local transmission equipment to rebroadcast these locally in places where the SABC terrestrial transmitters don’t reach or supply. Normal television bands are used.
Each household out of say 5000 would have to cough up a once-only R10 for this service. Owners would pay their TV licences to cover that end of things.
A Cape Town company supplying these systems has installed and services more than 150 of them in the Western and Northern Cape. Take one guess how its Sentech smart cards have been performing and remember that when one of those goes phut, it isn’t a case of grabbing the remote and switching to the temporary Sentech channels. It’s a case of an entire community being served up with dainty little Sentech “Access Denied” messages on their screens, followed by a few days of waiting for a technician and a new smart card to arrive all the way from Cape Town.
But viewers were soon to encounter another Sentech delight. Indeed the temporary channels were showing the programmes that the smart cards couldn’t, but for hours a day large, white, printed Sentech messages were being scrolled non-stop across the screens.
This, of course, actually ruins the viewer’s entertainment or news. Watching these Sentech temporary channels is like trying to listen to a piece of music while someone beats a loud drum next to your ear.
Sentech knows this because it has now been revealed that once before, when Sentech indulged in this nasty little technique, it was in the days of the disastrous analogue experiment. On that occasion Sentech scrolled the intrusive messages across the screen with the single and cynical purpose of “encouraging” the analogue customers to buy Sentech’s Vivid decoders
As of writing, the information channel on the Vivid system is announcing the shutting down of the temporary channels. Apparently Sentech doesn’t give a digital art if its smart cards work or not. It’s the First Law of Sentech Technology: it was meant to work, therefore it must work.
Now revealed is Sentech indulging itself in yet another “stuff the customer” exercise, but for a very special reason. It is now turning off the temporary channels as a means of finding out just how many of the smart cards aren’t working. It wants to see how many customers phone in to say that the aren’t receiving programmes. A quick way for Sentech to gauge how badly its latest tactics are working.
This is equivalent to kicking a dog to find out whether it has a tendency to bite and must rate as about the lowest one can go on the commercial scale. And should your smart card fail, don’t even try to get help from Sentech. You will dial the number and be greeted with a recording saying, “Welcome to the Vivid customer care centre”. And that’s as far as you will get, unless you want to sit and listen to crappy moegoe music for the rest of the afternoon. Try it yourself Tel:0860 084 843.
What I would like to ask is when in Hades is the minister responsible, or one of her deputies, going to do something about the continuing crude rip-off, misdirection and virtual fraud that is the Sentech “service”. It is high time they had their collective arses severely kicked.
And where, pray tell, is the Democratic Alliance on this matter?