Review: A Worthy Upgrade, the New Tata Sky+ Transfer HD DTH
Tata Sky’s new DVR box is a worthy upgrade if you love HD videos on the go.
Sure, online video consumption is growing in India, but TV viewing at home is still the most preferred style of family entertainment.
Though every DTH provider in India gives you similar content on your TV, it’s the user experience that matters. Tata Sky has always been on top of their game, while the Dish TVs, Videocon DTHs and Hathways of the world try to catch up with their user interface.
And now Tata Sky has come out with a new DVR for your home entertainment – the Tata Sky+ Transfer HD.
But is it a worthy upgrade? Let’s find out.
What’s Good?
The remote is something that Tata Sky aces. They have always kept the remote simple with well spaced buttons that always work and are long-lasting. The remote here remains the same as the previous DVR model. You also get a universal remote facility so that you don’t need to use two separate remotes while watching TV.
The new box comes with 3 tuners but you can only use two right now in India. The third is for future use when channels, instead of upscaling content to HD, start uplinking and downlinking content in HD. So this box is future-ready for India.
The Tata Sky+ HD Transfer comes with a sideloading functionality and you can watch recorded content from your set-top box on iOS and Android devices without consuming internet data bandwidth by streaming the content or transferring it to the device. All you need is an app.
You can also stream recorded content from your Tata Sky+ Transfer set-top box onto your device via Wi-Fi.
The box has a hard disk capacity of 500GB which is more than sufficient for over 600 hours of recorded content.
It also comes with Dolby Digital Plus 7.1 surround sound if you wish to connect it with your home theatre system.
What’s Bad?
The Tata Sky+ Transfer HD App tends to hang at times and the streaming is not that clear. It also depends on what kind of Wi-Fi network you have at home.
The USB connectivity also takes up a lot of time to load content.
And the universal problem is that there are still very few channels that you can watch and stream in HD.
The cost of owning one is also pretty high if you consider buying a full pack of channels on the box. And let’s be honest, if you own a box like this for home entertainment, you need to have all the channels at your disposal.
Why Buy it?
The new Tata Sky+ HD Transfer is great for home TV viewing and its portability is like a cherry on top. It is priced at Rs 9,300 which is a bit steep.
But if you are planning to buy your first HD DVR box for home, this one makes complete sense.
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)