Tiscali has come very late to the high definition TV (HDTV) party. Even though their digital set top box is HD ready and is able to receive HD content over IPTV, they have suffered from the fact that broadband speeds are so variable, that some homes do not have a fast enough connection to receive HD programming on-demand.
They are further constrained by the fact that the digital terrestrial broadcasts in HD, which are due to start next year are delivered by DVB-T2 which is not supported by Tiscali’s current set-top box.
The net result is that Tiscali TV has not been able to offer an HDTV service to its digital TV customers. This is soon to change however as Tiscali has decided to adopt Sky’s approach of pushing HD content down into the hard drive of the 160 GB storage of the set top boxes.
This allows Tiscali to offer their equivalent of Sky Anytime which offers a limited amount of programming “pushed” to the set top box to watch on-demand. The choice is naturally far smaller than a pull VOD solution which has an entire server farm of content at the disposal of the customer!
This solution ensures that all Tiscali customers can receive HDTV content whatever their broadband speed, but the choice of HD programming will be very limited relative to Sky and Virgin Media.
If you want help to compare high definition TV packages, are experts are more than happy to help.