Hawaii IPTV review: Is it worth the money?

March 4th, 2008

Filed Under Hawaii Resources, Hawaii TV |

There’s something about tv in Hawaii. It’s the warm aloha of local newscasts, cooking shows, various cable access shows and even the commercials. Whether you lived in Hawaii or visited on vacation, you find when you’re away, you yearn for the local flair. Enter Hawaii IPTV. I was so excited when I saw this because if there’s one thing I miss when I’m not in the islands, it’s watching Guy Hagi tell me the weather or Sam Choy tell me what local cuisine I can whip up. At Christmas time, I got $250 as a gift from my mother in law and saw this as a perfect opportunity to bite the bullet and put it toward subscribing to Hawaii IPTV for a year. (The start up cost including S&H is $344.99)

I was very glad to see they changed the set top box to a putty color rather than that hideous big bird yellow they had previously. We were so excited when it finally arrived. Immediately apparent is some of the broadband technology on which it runs on is outdated which the company needs to address. Now time to get to the good stuff, we tuned in to the “live” programming which is just the newscasts from KGMB, KHNL and KFVE. It’s implied you can watch the newscasts live from your time zone but we’ve yet to ever see one live. Over the past week, we are only able to see KGMB and none of the other two newscasts work for ANY of the days, only color bars and a delightful piercing audio. I emailed them a few days ago about it and have yet to hear back. I mean, KGMB is who we watch anyway but that’s not the point, we’re paying for all of the newscasts to be available.

Basically, in the course of a month you could watch every single program on there as nothing seems to be added since we’ve had it. We were especially excited to watch Sam Choy’s Kitchen cooking show and while there are probably 40+ shows, they’re all 11+ years old and the audio is bad to boot! The audio is bad on a lot of the shows. You have to do a lot of finagling with the audio on the remote that comes with it and your tv remote to get it to the point where its not completely grating. Some shows have a decent amounts of episodes like Sam Choy’s Kitchen and then you get Eh, U Da Kine, Ah? with Tony Solis and there are only 2 episodes and the audio is so bad you can barely hear what’s being said. I have to say that had the total cost been the bulk of my own money, I would be highly disappointed. Well, any amount, I’m still highly disappointed. The biggest reason I went ahead with it is the hint that they are negotiating to possibly get UH Sports for this year. If we could see Warrior Football, that would be a major plus but if that doesn’t happen, I have to wonder if this is worth keeping once the subscription is up.

Bottom line: Good idea, poor execution. I think the problems this system has are VERY fixable if the company wants to do so and build a good reputation. If the menu stays the same throughout the year with no new licensing agreements and added shows, people who are already subscribers are going to drop like flies. It’d be like deciding if you want to pay a monthly fee for newscasts which is nice but apparently not so much at this point in time for the KHNL and KFVE newscast viewers.

Comments

7 Comments so far

UpIrons on March 4, 2008 10:56 am
I hate the fact that their set top box doesn’t support WPA encryption for your wi-fi connection. This means that in order to use it via wi-fi you’re going to have to downgrade your wi-fi router, and all of your wireless devices, to use WEP. If you’re running WEP still then fine, but if you want to use WPA and actually use an encryption that has not yet been broken by hackers then you are kind of screwed. Of course, another solution for this would be to plug it in via ethernet, but that defeats the purpose of the wireless built-in!
New programs on Hawaii IPTV : True Aloha on April 26, 2008 7:04 am
[...] my fingers crossed a good amount of programs are being updated as this has been a pet peeve of mine as discussed before and they also had an outage of KGMB after they other newscasts were fixed. This technology can be [...]
Chris Dey on August 19, 2008 9:52 pm
Aloha!

Thanks to everyone for providing us feedback on the service. I hope that you’ve seen on going improvements as the technology continues to evolve. Our technology provider, Neulion Inc., has been in the news quite a bit lately including a feature in the Wall Street Journal.

We’ve received a lot of positive response on the Hawaii IPTV service. Feedback has been particularly good on the live programs like the multiple KGMB, KHNL and KFVE newscasts along with shows like the Andy Bumatai Show.

On a related note, we announced today that Hawaii IPTV and KFVE ‘The Home Team’ have entered into a multi year contract to broadcast UH sports. I know that many of you have been hoping for this contract to come through…it goes without saying that we have. We’ve been working on it for nearly three years.

Thanks for tuning in.

Aloha,
Chris & Kimberly Dey
Hawaii IPTV is slowly redeeming itself : True Aloha on August 20, 2008 7:04 am
[...] may remember this post where I was not completely convinced that Hawaii IPTV was worth the money yet. Since then, [...]
Pele on August 20, 2008 10:15 pm
Mahalo Chris and Kimberly, I did blog about this addition in another more current post so we are very happy to see the addition of many UH Sports to the line up. (I’m hoping they’ll be available more than just the one day, that would be great!) Also being able to watch the Merrie Monarch Festival will be a definite plus!

While those are great additions, the audio still has not been addressed/improved and many of the shows remain outdated. We’ve watched everything available to us at this point and are anxious for updated programming. We see improvements and are hopeful additional programming will continue to be added!

Mahalo!
UpIrons on August 20, 2008 10:59 pm
The UH sports is great news. I am looking forward to being able to watch the warriors on it!

My only real issue with the NeuLion box is that it doesn’t support WPA in the wifi settings. It seems to me that they could fix this with a software update. Unfortunatley, if you go to their support page, it tells you to register in order to open a ticket. However, clicking on their register link tells you that you aren’t authorized to view that page. So essentially you aren’t able to register, nor open a ticket. So much for getting a firmware update on the IPTV hardware.

I know that’s no fault of Hawaii IPTV but if you guys are still listening, maybe you can get NeuLion to consider supporting WPA on the wifi connection. WEP is outdated now and actually is borderline dangerous for people to use on their home wifi networks and most home routers don’t allow a mix of WPA and WEP on the same router, which means that ALL of the wifi devices in the home must use the minimum encryption level (WEP) thanks to the NeuLion IPTV box not supporting more modern encryption.
Pele on August 21, 2008 3:20 pm
That’s a great point. I hope this is something that can be fixed by NeuLion ASAP!