On Jul 1, 5:48*pm, Mike Henry wrote:
In My1Xn.30545$cJ6.14820@hurricane, "ian field"

wrote:
"larkim" wrote in message
....
Not sure if the message has been seen here, but my beloved Thomson
DHD4000 will cease to have a working EPG in a couple of weeks time as
InView (the company responsible for broadcasting the old 4TV EPG
overnight) are withdrawing their service.

Charming. How nice of them.

[...]

It looks as if my Digifusion FVRT90 and myTechwood PVR160TW are both
affected - neither are showing EPG past the 7th.

I've emailed both companies for more info (the Techwood seems to be a Vestel
in disguise) - neither have bothered to reply!

Contrast that despicable behaviour with TiVo (soon to return to the UK in
their partnership with Virgin cable), who closed their UK office eight
years ago but still provide a full EPG guide data service for all the UK
series 1 TiVo PVRs to this day. This has included several major upgrades
to the backend guide data servers in the USA, and an upgrade when Sky
changed the radio channels to 4 digits. TiVo could have easily called it a
day at any time but didn't.

But TiVo's transmission mechanism was more or less free wasn't it?
i.e. over the internet? InView had to pay to broadcast the service
over the airways, which I suspect is seriously more expensive. (but
nonetheless, credit to TiVo for sticking to it!!)

Its just a shame that Thomson (and the other device manufacturers)
didn't build a firmware which allowed for use of the Freeview EPG in
the event of the InView one being withdrawn. I think there was a view
at one time that the InView EPG would be capable of inserting ads,
which (whilst not appealing) would at least have made the service
potentially commercially viable.

I don't blame InView - I blame Thomson / Digifusion, but only a little
bit. They got really reliable, functional machines out 6 years ago
and had to come up with an EPG solution as there was no Freeview EPG
at the time the boxes were designed.

Matt