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Home / Business

Sky TV customers angry over 'awful' software update

Patrice Dougan
By Patrice Dougan
Assistant Chief of Staff·NZ Herald·
13 Jan, 2016 09:19 AM4 mins to read

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Angry and frustrated customers have lamented the update as slow, causing the picture to lag, and say it has a small, difficult-to-read font, on the Sky Facebook page. Photo / Dean Purcell

Angry and frustrated customers have lamented the update as slow, causing the picture to lag, and say it has a small, difficult-to-read font, on the Sky Facebook page. Photo / Dean Purcell

Thousands of disgruntled customers have complained about Sky Television's "dumb" new software upgrade.

Angry and frustrated clients have taken to the network's Facebook page to condemn the update as slow and causing the picture to lag. They say it has a small, difficult-to-read font.

One man's post garnered 16,000 "likes" within hours. Most of the more than 2500 comments written below his post agreed with him.

Stewart Bryan wrote: "Your new upgrade to MySky is awful - a real backwards step. Smaller font I can't read, terrible colours and so so SLOW to react."

He said it "might be time to look at Netflix or others".

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Other people began re-posting his complaint to Sky, while many more offered their own complaints.

Jessica said: "The new update/upgrade is a giant headache! Very slow and lagging terribly. Can't turn it up or down, change channel correctly or really do anything! Disappointed, I don't even use onDemand."

Jodie Loos said: "Wow, Sky. If you're trying to get us to switch to another company, bravo ... your new upgrade is awful. It's lagging, there are delays, I can't turn the sound off when I hit guide or planner, I can't end watching a recorded programme by pressing planner any more and deleting it straight away. The list goes on. I'm so disappointed. It feels like I'm using the old gray set-top box before MySky."

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Fred van der Vyver complained: "The new MySky upgrade really sucks. The fonts are a terrible colour and too small. I now have to get up and get close to the TV to read the information. Can I revert back?"

Jojo Leaf-Hadfield posted: "Your update is DUMB! Its ugly, slow and weird."
Sky spokeswoman Kirsty Way said tonight that a bug fix for the new software was in the making.

The software upgrade to the Sky interface had now been rolled out to almost all of the company's 800,000 domestic household customers, she said, and it changed the way users navigated the system.

"I completely get that when you're used to something for years and years and when things change it's quite confronting; it can be quite a shock and frustrating," Ms Way said.

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"Yes, it's a change, but it's the basis for our future, so bug fixes and enhancements and new features will be an ongoing thing."

However, the company had noticed that a "common thread" in the complaints about the new system was that some people found it difficult to read, Ms Way said.

"We've taken that on board in a software release. We're in the new year now, so that will be the first thing we address, that readability."

It was "well in progress now", after the company first saw the font-size issue in complaints last year.

However, she could not provide a release date as Sky wanted to "make sure it's been thoroughly tested" before it was rolled out.
Another common issue for people was that the picture appeared blurry, Ms Way said.

She offered this advice to customers: "If you connect your HDMI cable from your set-top box to your TV, that makes a world of difference, and you can also play with your tuning on the television, with contrast and colour and stuff like that.

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"It's hard, we can't set a formula because every TV is different, but they are two things that people can do now."

Ms Way added that Sky's social media section was not staffed to deal with every complaint on the Facebook page "when we get volumes like that", but she added: "If we can't respond personally to every comment, we're certainly listening and taking that on board".

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