Be Excellent To Each Other

BT are offering a Humax DTR-T1000 (RRP £299.99) under the following conditions

1. You already have BT Infinity or Broadband
2. You pay £6.95 Delivery for the Humax DTR-T1000
3. You pay £49.00 Activation fee (this includes some power line adapters, no details on these as yet though)
4. You take a 12 month subscription to BT Vision Essential @£4 a month

I called BT and they said once the 12 months is up you can keep the box and the only change is that the BT Vision Essential would no longer be available, all the Freeview and catch up would still work

So if you’re a BT ADSL user you can get a £300 Youview box with a 1TB drive for little over £100

Box arrived today, a day early. It came with 2 X 200MB powerline adapters as well.

Plugged it in and followed the wizard to set it up, then downloaded an update. This took a while even on my 80\20 Infinity, once done a reboot is required.

Have to say I’m impressed, the EPG is nice and crisp. You can go back 7 days on most channels although some stuff is not available like the news and films.

When you do go back it’s not as instant as changing Freeview channels. I randomly selected an episode of Never Mind the Buzzcocks and had to click a button saying I was over 16 before it would play. There was also 3 minutes of adverts before the 4OD programme I select started.

It also has a couple of other on demand services a movie one that SKY is involved in as well as Milkshake that has kids tv. The BT service I had to subscribe to was not activated yet.

This will never replace SKY for choice, but it’s the best thing I’ve seen for “free TV” and through BT it costs next to nothing. The £55 I paid upfront will come out of my next bill in 2013 and I could sell the 2 power line plugs for £40. So I pay £50 for the BT on demand over the next year and get a £300 PVR.

How does this work, then? Is it through ADSL?

You need to have a network cable and a coax plugged into it. That’s why BT are shipping free powerline plugs with it.

The ADSL deals with all the on demand stuff like IPlayer and also handles updates to the software, whilst the coax does the Freeview TV.

There is a Scart and HDMI input, might be more but I didn’t pay that much attention (Just used HDMI)

When using it you get a normal looking EPG, except you can click on the date bar at the top and go back up to 7 days. Depending on what you choose it then launches an on demand player like IPlayer and plays what you choose.

Also has a 1TB HD and lets you record from the EPG with one press. Not sure if you can record TV from another day though, will try that next week.

Mine also has a BT and SKY on demand service where you can buy films and TV, the SKY one claims to get films a year before Netflix. There are also plenty of empty slots on the on demand screen so I would expect more stuff to be offered if this takes off.

I get most of my TV from the NG and use XBMC, so its doubtful I will be buying very much for now. This is a great Freeview TV solution though, my wife loves it, to be honest not sure I would have ever paid £300 for the box, but BT made it so cheap it was worth a go.

I've already got a Humax HDR-FoxT2 which is the freeview HD box without Youview and it's great.
I'm pretty tempted to sell it and go for this BT version.