Reliance Big TV HD DVR: There are Better Options Available

The DTH service market is abuzz (More like on fire) with many HD channels being offered. And with people moving to HD televisions sets, it’s quite obvious that you need to have a good DTH service in place of your existing cable TV connection. It looks like Reliance is taking this segment quite seriously and have come out with their Big TV HD DVR which not only provides HD content but also allows recording media.

Design and Features
The Big TV set top box (STB) is just like any ordinary STB. The metal casing gives it a solid look and feel. However, there’s nothing much added to the box’s design. 

Well built, but an average design

At the back of the box there are ports for Component, Composite, HDMI and SPDIF. Also there is a USB port, an RJ45 port, an RF Out port and two LNB Input ports to connect the box to the dish. The USB port is not meant to play movies from your pen drive, rather its meant for storing more content into it. The Ethernet port doesn't have any use for now but in the future it might come in handy to watch IP TV.

A 160 GB Hard Disk Drive

The remote control bundled with has been built well which means that it can sustain a few falls. It feels quite big and bulky, but that’s not much of an issue. The good thing is that the soft buttons have been laid out well and after a few minutes, you’ll easily get accustomed to it.

Interface
This is probably one of the biggest issues with this STB. Leaving aside a couple of screens here and there, the whole interface is completely red. Add to that the sluggish browsing through menus and waiting really long for various menus to appear on the screen, the whole experience is quite boring and can be a little irritating as well.

Red Rage

Coming to some slightly better features is that the remote has options like Select, Cinema, Interaction and Guide. The Select option will give you a whole category of channels to select from, so if you’re only looking for Movies then you just select one of your subscribed channels from the Movies category. While testing this piece, I could only see the Movies section and there wasn’t any option to browse through various categories.