Regular listeners to our podcast will be well aware of the story featured on tonight’s Watchdog.
In July and August, Freeview boxes around the UK started packing up.
The reason?
Older Freeview boxes can’t cope with the increasing number of channels, and when the boxes scan for new channels, they lock up, effectively trashing the box. Around 250,000 boxes have been affected.
The troublesome boxes are:
- Bush IDVCR01
- Daewoo DS608P
- Daewoo SV900
- Labgear DTT100
- Portland DP100
- Triax DVB2000T – set-top box
Well done to Watchdog for finally bringing this to a wider audience. Here at FrequencyCast, we’ve been pushing this story online, in our podcasts and on national radio. It seems that some of our listeners helped the BBC with their enquiries for this week’s Watchdog show.
For more on the story of faulty Freeview boxes, go to www.frequencycast.co.uk/freeviewlandfill.html.
If you’ve not tried our podcast, give us a try for the latest Freeview news.
November 23rd, 2008 at 7:57 pm
After having the Daewoo set top box for a number of year,s i thought there would be some con to be contrived and the digital companys would be trying to screw money out of some one for providing a servce,i just hope the two flat screen tv,s which i have recently bought do not suffer with the same affliction after a few years,its a bit diffrent replacing a top box rather than a intergrated system.
December 8th, 2008 at 7:08 am
I always thought this ‘free’ telly lark would have a catch to it, my children have had freeview in their rooms for 5 years and now their boxes have stopped working, we have tvs with intergrated freeview which are probably going to stop working too. As a sky customer for years, I remember the good old days when we had free channels with sky, they haven’t been able to provide that for 16 years now, so what made us think another company could out run them? There’s no such thing as a free lunch, we should all just stick to that and stop being conned, as usual free view who made the money from our purchases of boxes and top up cards have taken the money and run, I’m sick and tired of this ‘not our fault’ attitude once the bank balance looks good. In the meantime do I buy more boxes to disappoint my kids with?
December 8th, 2008 at 10:30 pm
So does this mean that my tv with freeview built in that I purchased in May for my dad will no longer receive the free view channels ? he told me tonight he has only been able to receive the normal BBC1/2 ITV1 / Channel 4 and Channel 5 since last week ????
March 23rd, 2009 at 10:24 am
Sagem’s helpdesk have confirmed that the Sagem PVR6240TUK also suffers from the same problem, and that no fix is available.
November 27th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
my thomson set top box failed too.i bought a goodmans box to replace it and had to return it as several channels appeared then disappeared. i am now hesitant to buy another in case ican,t get arefund i,m pretty miffed as my old box was fine and most of the new channels are absolute crap
October 12th, 2010 at 9:53 pm
when today 12/10/10 for the first time my bush MK9 2NW model DV1000B freeview box I switched on my tv and box I found it jammed on the text channel MOBILIZER a channel I do not use . when I tried to change channel it started to say it was charging me for texts at £1.50 per minute . I unpluegged and disconnected 3 times to no avail I am now afraid to put my tv on and wonder if the are charging me for this unwanted service. yours startled and scared.