Just be quiet and consume, consumer!

When my Digifusion PVR suddenly wouldn't show the day's programs when I turned it on recently, I knew immediately it wasn't a fault. And sure enough, some googling showed that, as I suspected, InView, the company providing the electronic program guide (EPG) information had decided, with no notice whatsoever, to simply terminate the service.

The reason for this is somewhat obscure. You can google for the official 'explanation', which witters on about lack of bandwidth, etc etc, but clearly, business being business:-

(a) someone was paying InView for the provision of the service

and

(b) that 'someone' has stopped doing so.

Now the affected machines come from a range of manufacturers. Digifusion was taken over by Beko, and Sony rebadged one of those machines themselves. Inverto and Thomson are two other affected brands. How many machines are affected is unclear; several thousand is probably a fairly reasonable guess, it could go into five figures, given that the Digifusion machines, in particular, have proven to be highly stable with excellent software - and, judging by forum posters - hard to replace with equally capable modern models.

It's not clear therefore exactly who was paying InView (and has now stopped) and everyone's staying rather tightlipped. On the Digital Spy forums there's a lively discussion on this topic, a petition with over 1,000 names already added, has been started, and with luck the actual truth behind the whole affair might emerge shortly.

But in the interim, organisations such as the Digital TV Group (DTG) have rather mendaciously informed affected owners that if only they had purchased machines with the official FreeView 'tick' - the DTG seal of approval - this problem wouldn't have happened, because these machines would have fallen back to the Freeview standard 7 day EPG.

Unfortunately for them, someone has dug out some of the packaging these machines came in. And found that in fact some of them - the Digifusion units, for example - DO have the official Freeview 'Tick'. Of course, when that was awarded, there WAS no 7 day Freeview EPG. This is why manufacturers had to come up with their own EPG system. So there's no way for these 'officially certified' boxes to fall back to a standard that, at the time of their certification, simply didn't exist.

So now we have a whole bunch of people running for cover. They probably expected that those placid, flat-screen owning consumers would simply blink in surprise, go down to Curry's and fork out all over again for a new PVR. That's what consumers do, after all. Isn't it?. But to their surprise a rather substantial number of owners have decided that having an essential service cut off with no warning and then subsequently being lied to by all parties, is not acceptable. Letters are being drafted, to MPs, to Which?, to the BBC (who have, in fairness, given some airtime to the issue).

Now the obsolescence of a bunch of 4-5 year old boxes might seem a small thing to get upset about. But the Freeview consortium approved these boxes. Now it appears to be collaborating with some of its business partners to simply abandon their owners and to misrepresent the certification issues for which it must take responsibility.

There's talk of Sony possibly stepping up to fund the service. I'm not holding my breath on this one. But it really makes me wonder how we could have come to this point - where consumers are simply held to ransom and treated with what can only be described as utter contempt.

EDIT: A quick look back at DigitalSpy after posting this reveals that the digitallogo.digitaluk.co.uk website has apparently quietly removed the Digifusion model from their list of certified devices. A spokesperson for the company even had the gall to respond to a query from one of the posters by replying that they couldn't find the device listed!.

However, someone's kept a previous google cache, which clearly shows that the models WERE certified, so now the fur's really flying!. A fascinating tale and I can't wait to find out what happens next.