03/05/09 – The Day TopUp TV Killed Itself

I’ve been a fan of  TopUp TV for a while – offering a cheaper experience to Sky + . It’s been pretty much a pain free experience, my 3yr old hand-me down Thomson 6300 box worked well up until March where then it became victim to a ‘common fault’ – the PSU died. I decided to keep this box and repair it for the bedroom, and get a new box with more storage space. Still a Thomson 6300 – but with a 250Gb hard drive, instead of the 160Gb drive it’s older relative had.

All peachy.

Until today.

I got up this morning to be told by the other half the box wasn’t working. I assumed it had crashed and needed to have the plug pulled out. Which I did. The box started twitching to life, lights flashing all over the place, but it just wouldn’t start up. I wasn’t happy. For a box just over a month old – it shouldn’t do this. The box went in into it’s packaging and I took it back to Tesco. I wasn’t going to ring up TopUp TV, or the Tesco Electrical Helpline – I didn’t want to fix this problem myself – this just SHOULDN’T happen.

The woman at Tesco happily refunded me and I picked up a NEW Thomson box – a 6021-25 – it was a totally different style to the 6300 and actually was smaller. Great.

Having a little scout online when I got home to find out more I noticed this thread on Digital Spy had gotten very big. Everyone was having the problem i’d had with my box, something had killed hundreds, nee thousands of TopUp TV boxes. The recommended fix? Manually switch back the firmware (which was hit and miss) or get this, format the hard drive, losing HOURS of recordings, even these fixes aren’t working for a lot of people. So people have been left with bricked boxes.

TopUp TV have admitted blame in Sunday’s update to the Electronic Program Guide had something within that has b0rked everyones boxes by accident. Good eh? See their statement on the matter here.

I really find this fucking incredible that TopUpTV can do this – nice one guys!