Improvements to Sky Digital

A good idea, but very difficult to do on a normal Sky reciever. The EPG is broadcast on a single transponder alongside the background music. Without 2 tuners you can' t see one thing and listen to something else from a diffrent transponder, you could on Sky+, but even then you'd have to abort any other recordings taking place

Possibly not the right thread, apologies, but I wonder what percentage of Sky viewers have the EPG music turned on because they like it?

I have it OFF (if you'll pardon the expression!) and suspect that the majority would either prefer it off, or wouldn't care if it disappeared.

That, with a bit of furious re-programming, would partly solve the problem.

I would like:

- full EPG listings for all the radio channels
- a means of connecting a PC to the digibox via that serial port on the back, and software for Windows & Linux so you could program it to automatically change channels, add entries to the planner etc. Likewise, the ability to browse all the EPG data on a PC.
- them to get rid of all the unneccessary graphics and background images in the EPG software so everything loaded much faster
- A slimmer/faster version of music choice's software, which also allowed you to type in a number to switch between the 10 channels
- an end to those frequent occasions where the EPG of the channel doesn't match what is actually going out at the time, one programme gets stuck after its finished, or no future programmes for a channel are listed for no apparent reason (presumably due to them transmitting multiple copies of the EPG on different transponders)
- ability to program the default channel the digibox goes to (normally 998 Sky Welcome) after a hard power off

If you have a browse round the Hospital Radio technical pages on the web, William, sorry but I can't remember exactly where, you'll find a "frig" to make this happen.

It's fairly standard where Hospital Radios want one Digibox to come back on to Sunrise Radio and the other to PrimeTime Radio after a power failure, so their IRN feed and their sustaining service both come back without any manual intervention.

I did try batting around a few ideas to improve EPG... how about:
- Moving Music channels to start on 350 and Kids to start on 460?
- Changing to 4-digit channel numbers?
- Changing to letter codes (having 3 letters would give over 15000 combos compared to 1000 combos withthree numbers)

The EPG is only broadcast on 1 transponder. However every transponder carries the now and next information for all the channels. However there is often a diffrence between the N&N of the channel you're on and the N&N of that channel as seen from another.

For example it's 8:30 and you're watching E4, but look at what's on BBC1 using the N&N banner. It says that the 8:30 programme has started, but if you go onto BBC1 it's N&N banner only changes when the programme as actually started (it's triggered by the playout computer at TV Centre)