Quote:
Originally Posted by Iceman57
I own the Arris Gateway HDPVR with four portals and have now for about six or seven years. My Gateway still does work fantastically but the menu and overall interface is extremely outdated. It doesn't navigate well, you cant create folders or groups on your record list and the search function is slow and cumbersome. So yesterday I looked into this BlueSky TV and was severely disappointed to find out it only has 500 GB of record space which in my opinion is not nearly enough but what I found to be even more discouraging is the BlueSky's eSATA port will not support any external hard drives which is completely ludicrous. I created my own 4TB external hard drive for my Arris Gateway which allows me close to eight hundred HD hours of recordings and with a wife plus two boys who all like to record everything then binge watch it later, it is very much needed.
Now I mentioned this lack of storage space to a representative of the BlueSky team and his solution was to have me rent (you can't buy the hardware but instead can rent the equipment from Shaw for a two year contract) additional primary units plus a corresponding portal and place them on separate TV's giving me 2TB of space but the kicker is it means that those TV's are no longer connected to each other. To me this is absolutely counterproductive as its going backwards to how the old separate PVR's use to be, remember when you didn't know where you might watch a movie or hockey game and you would have to record it on the living room TV, the bonus room TV and the bedroom TV all separately? Having BlueSky literally means going back ten years when it was a pain to have to do that and now Shaw is asking us to do it again?!?!?!
I have read conflicting forum posts saying that three primary BlueSky units can talk to each other but both Shaw tech operators I've spoken to said they were pretty sure the primary units would not be connected, only the portals would but either way, I don't understand how Shaw can be so slow when it comes to introducing new technology, they have a free census within their own customer base to obtain the necessary feedback as to what we would expect in a product like BlueSky. Instead they start with all of these limitation placing the product itself in danger of not even being relevant in today's content streaming world. If BlueSky had the specs necessary in a product like this then i would have been easily sold where as now I'd guess its probably at least a year away before any type of "storage expander" is available for this which is just sad since the wait seems so unnecessary.
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So I was at a buddies house over the weekend who just got BlueSky TV and I have to admit, it was a lot of fun to use. The menu is super responsive, the On Demand section is setup a lot like Netflix with shows being easier to find, the voice search is not gimmicky, it works quite well and makes changing channels, recording series or searching for new shows much easier by limiting it to only a two or three button process. Now it turns out that the BlueSky primary units are in fact connected allowing you to record on one TV and watch it on another. Each BlueSky unit holds 500 GB of space with 6 tuners which means you could actually record eighteen different shows at the same time, lol. Even though switching from the Gateway to BlueSky will reduce our "record space" from 4 TB to 1.5 we've gone ahead and booked the appointment for the week before Easter giving us time to watch or delete the shows we have saved on our expander and then time over the long weekend to play with the BlueSky.