Update: I’ve since upgraded to a Roku 3. You can read all about it here.
As I’m about to put my Apple TV and LG BP630 Blu-Ray on eBay having replaced them with the PS3, I decided to fork out £9.99 on Sky’s NOW TV Box. While I’m perfectly happy – beyond, even – with the PS3, the NOW TV Box is significantly cheap enough to buy and test. The supplied HDMI cable alone is worth at least a tenner. And the P&P cost of the NOW TV Box is also included within that £9.99 price tag.
The unit itself is tiny and fits in the same space that the Apple TV once occupied. The NOW TV Box is essentially a customised and rebranded Roku LT which normally retails at £49.99. It supports a maximum resolution of 720p and is wireless only. It comes supplied with a good length HDMI cable, a power supply, a remote control with two triple-A batteries supplied.
When the unit is first switched on, the white against blue NOW TV logo appears and after a few seconds starts up into set-up mode where you select your wireless network. This is where my problems started.
Virgin Media’s Super Hub 2, when left alone, works well enough. Tinker with its settings and you risk losing routing, wireless connectivity and all manner of things.
The NOW TV Box only works with the 2.4Ghz wireless spectrum. The Super Hub 2 allows me to run 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz wireless networks simultaneously. Apart from the Kindle Paperwhite 2 and the NOW TV Box, all my wireless devices connect via the 5Ghz network.
During my attempts to get the NOW TV box to talk to the Super Hub 2 to complete the setup, I:
- Changed the 2.4Ghz wireless SSID
- Changed the 2.4Ghz wireless password
- Changed the 2.4Ghz channels from Auto to 6, 13, 11
- Set-up a guest 2.4GHz network with no password and filtered by the MAC address of the NOW TV Box & hid the SSID
- Rebooted the Super Hub 2 twice – the first time it came back, I lost external internet routing (wi-fi connected fine) – rebooting the SH2 again resolved external routing
The one thing I noticed in all this tinkering was that the NTVB was being picked up by the SH2 – it saw it as a connect device in all circumstances mentioned above. Why wasn’t the NTVB connecting, though?
I eventually – somehow – got the NOW TV box to talk to my wireless network by exposing the NTVB (NOW TV Box) hidden menu. You press the HOME button five times, followed by FF, PLAY/PAUSE, RW, PLAY/PAUSE and finally FF again. One thing I noticed was that the NTVB hidden menu was displaying the wrong SSID, but showing excellent signal strength and had an IP address. But the set-up menu would not let me move forward (Error code 014). NOW TV’s advise was to disable the network pings, which I did, but this did not immediately fix the problem.
Back in the hidden menu, I was looking at ways of getting the box to forget the wireless settings. I had previously pulled the power to reboot the box, but it had still remembered the old SSID and IP address. For some strange reason, I used the iperf (generally used for performance/diagnostic testing) tool. Upon exiting that, the settings had gone. I rebooted the NTVB through the hidden menu reboot option and completed the wireless set-up without any further issues.
Rummaging around the NOW TV Community forums suggest there are some interoperability issues with Virgin customers. Given I’m an IT professional, I dread to think how regular consumers with Virgin connections are going to resolve these issues without external help. It may be a £10 device, but there is always the problem of being too cheap. An ethernet connection would have had this unit up and running in a matter of minutes. If the firmware update was made available after the unit shipped, there’d be no way of applying it unless you used a third party wi-fi network.
Once the box was connected, it automatically installed the NOW TV app along with apps for Sky News, Demand 5, and BBC iPlayer. Further apps can be installed via the Roku App store. Was a bit disappointed to see no Netflix, but then again this is a Sky box. Full featured proper Rokus do have access to a Netflix app.
As this is a wireless device, you’ll have to deal with all the problems that streaming video over wireless entails. Bandwidth is more limited and wireless is susceptible to interference (leading to more bandwidth issues) – another reason that Sky should have considered bringing in a device with an ethernet port. The result of this is that while I have by and large experienced perfectly good video and sound quality, putting strain on the local wireless has resulted in degraded picture quality (as the video stream is adaptive).
TED (Extended Cut) started off horribly blurry for about 5 minutes, then readjusted to a much higher quality picture thereafter. This was the only title I experienced problems with. All other movies in the Movie Pass and TV shows in the Entertainment pass played back without issue. I put the unit on the live TV channels yesterday and have no complaints at all with the picture quality of the live streams.
The BBC iPlayer app is as good as any other version on other platforms, but I found that there is delay in getting the video stream at the start of each program. I keep iPlayer settings in HD.
The NOW TV menu system feels much more sluggish than that of the PS3. But still perfectly usable. But fair enough – the PS3 has a proper CPU and GPU and is a much mightier beastie than the NTVB (and the price reflects that). The PS3 is also connected to the network via ethernet.
The NOW TV Box is an incredibly cheap way of getting TV channels such as Sky Atlantic (so therefore Game of Thrones as and when season four is released) and the Sky Movies channels. But it’s not perfect and there are many things that could be improved. If I ever get a second TV, it’ll be a perfect compliment to it.
Hoping that Sky will use a higher spec Roku for the next major version of the NOW TV Box. One with ethernet and a slightly more powerful processor.
