Day 1 Impressions - Optic TV to Telus TV+

[giantbrownguy]

First Impressions after moving from classic Optik TV to the new Telus TV+.

Pros:

• Interface is way nicer
• App options are nice to limit extra equipment
• Remote is highly functional
• Channels haven't changed (my mother-in-law had the opposite experience with Shaw after upgrading her equipment)

Cons:

• There's a $10 fee for PVR recording that wasn't disclosed to me when I requested the equipment. That is annoying.
• There's a lot of buffering - when you first change channels or use menus, it seems to cause the audio to stutter. Once you stop playing around, it settles.
• The Telus app is still fairly slow and laggy. I was expecting better performance compared to the old gear, but it's honestly not. The menu is newer and nicer but not really faster. 
• Settings are a bit of a pain to get to. 
• Signing in to services doesn't have a "use phone as keyboard" option, making that experience slow.

I'll report back as I use it more, but if you're wanting me to check anything, reply here.

[Optik-Kate]

Hi @giantbrownguy , thanks for this feedback. We're glad you are enjoying certain aspects of our new TV service. We have an update coming near the end of July to help address the performance, it will reduce the lag time in between actions. Please stay tuned! 

[giantbrownguy]

@Optik-Kate one other piece of feedback. I've been working with Technical Support for the last day trying to get my PVR to show up in the box but it hasn't been happening. The current thinking is they have to escalate to the back end team because something went wrong in provisioning my profile. I can access the PVR on my iPhone, but not from the box itself. I'm a more advanced technical user, but someone more novice might be more frustrated by it. Just a heads up that this should probably be resolved before the boxes are widely distributed. 

Also for you and @A-B , I was disconnected from Technical Support in the middle of a call last night around 10pm, and rather than receive a call back, I had to sit in the call queue for 20 minutes to get through again. The follow up seems to need some work. I get the agents are busy but they were in the middle of working through my issue when we got disconnected. Again, I am patient, but some others may be less so. 

[A-B]

I hear you for sure. And yes our Tech Support team is often busy throughout the day assisting clients. You can also reach out to our team via our Twitter or Facebook as an alternate method.

[HiddenValley]

Interesting you had issues with the PVR  -I also lost all my PVR settings and saved shows over the past few days. Very frustrating, with no recourse to restore our PVR after it was mysteriously removed! 
@A-B  @Optik-Kate, can you provide some insight on the intended availability of our PVR? Since it lives in the TELUS cloud do customers have any way to "download" or backup the settings to our boxes? 

[A-B]

There's no way to recover lost recordings, but if you'd like we can gather your account info and pass it along to our Optik team to look into. If you'd like that, feel free to reach out to us over at our Twitter or Facebook accounts and say you're coming from the community. Then we can verify your account to gather the info we'd need to pass along to our team. Thanks.

[A-B]

Thanks for the feedback, it's very valuable to hear from the community and rest assured we're watching closely and passing everything along to the appropriate team. @Optik-Kate there is some good stuff here for you!

[buckycat]

How do you find the picture quality compared to the old box? 

[giantbrownguy]

Seems fine but I’m watching my first shows tonight. The brief glimpses I’ve seen, there’s no real different. Mind you, we’re watching 1080p broadcast on a 4K tv so your mileage may vary.

I’m still having issues having the PVR set up but I can use the app on my Apple TV so this ends up working better for me. I only got the boxes because you need it for cloud PVR but using my Apple TV is the preferred option for me.

[giantbrownguy]

I’m watching a recording of the qualifying for the Austrian Grand Prix through my Apple TV. Quality is top notch.

[giantbrownguy]

@Optik-Kate - recommendation for a future update - let users adjust recording stop time. Thinking of sports events, there’s no option to end the recording an hour or two later.

[Optik-Kate]

Hi @giantbrownguy we actually recently added auto extensions for sports. 90 mins for tennis and 60 mins for other sports. This is the temporary workaround while we work on the full feature where users can set flexible extensions. 

[giantbrownguy]

@Optik-Kate that makes sense. I noticed the records were long but it’s good to hear it’s being worked on.