Ok so here goes, a quick review of the ITVN product.
I placed my order with the ITVN website on August 25th and received it today, September 7th. I'm not impressed with the time it took to get to me, especially because they took my order on the 25th yet they didnt ship the package until August 29th - 4 days before they shipped the product!!!
So for shipping, ITVN get a low score.
Now for the actual product:
The package itself: It has everything you would expect to find in a basic dvd player package: remote, RCA cables, stb, power pack and also it has an ethernet package. One item that it did not have, was a set of batteries, even though the ITVN website says that batteries are included.
Setup was simple. Put that wire there, and put that one there. It couldnt be easier to do, very simple.
The remote: This is possibly the worst remote ever made in history. There is about a 2 second delay from when you push power to when the stb actually powers up. Until you know this, you will probably turn the stb on and off and on and off with your power button pushing!!! But seriously, the remote sucks ass.
I purchased the Setanta Sports package, for $14.95 a month, pretty much on blind faith as, if you take the time to really look at their website, they dont actually show you schedules anywhere.
I can confirm that the $15 package that ITVN offer, is offered by Setanta themselves via their website (but you need to output your pc to a tv to watch it on a tv) for $11.99 (The setanta Broadband channel has lots of recorded games that you can stream on demand - this product from ITVN doesnt have that, I think the feed is Setanta USA). I have a 51" widescreen tv, and when I was watching the Setanta channel, I had a significant amount of pixelation. I discovered I was on the lowest setting. I increased the video quality to the maximum, and I'm afraid to report that the image quality still sucks. It's not as bad as it was, but it is certainly not very good, not the "dvd quality" that was being touted. I connected my ITVN stb to my tv via component cables, for maximum quality available, and I have a 6meg internet connection capable of downloading at 720KB/sec.
Next up, I tried out the adult package. It is obvious that the ITVN people are definately competent here. Sign up to the $30/month package was so simple it was almost scary. Enter the last 4 digits of the credit card you used to sign up with, and boom! your done!
This time, the video quality WAS much better, and was certainly comparable to a dvd. So the question I'm left asking is... wtf is wrong with the setanta stream?! I tried the pornholio thing, but it said I couldnt view it, even though i was under the understanding that the $30/month subscription fee allowed me access to everything, except the ppv stuff.
My summary:
Good stuff:
easy to setup
easy to upgrade
provides content otherwise unavailable to me
good selection of porn
Porn streams were good quality.
Bad stuff:
Slow as hell shipping
unbelievably crappy remote
Setanta sports stream is $4 more than Directv, Globecast, Setanta Broadband
Setanta stream was not very good.
Conclusion:
I am going to keep it, because I really want the sports programming, but I am not as happy as I might be.... others may not be willing to keep an over-priced product such as this. I'm really quite dissapointed with the picture quality.