When we started the social media interactions with our customers the objectives were very clear to us. We wanted to share iControl internal news with you, open new contact points for our customers for queries/issues, asking the suggestions from the people who matter the most.... YOU. We got our resources together and started with it. A lot of you guys interacted about everything; the features you want us to add (while some are add really fast some might take time or few could not be feasible), the features/initiatives you appreciate and the issues which some of you have faced.

We have always tried to solve the issues faced by our customers. Whenever I see a post on any of these social media contacts which tells me that someone is facing a problem, my first priority is to put the relevant person on the job to resolve the issue ASAP. But we would need some patience and few details from you to help us help you. Whatever details you can provide us pertaining to the issue will help us investigating but the first and foremost is your UserdID which is provided to you at the time of installation (that pink form filled by our engineer mention it). This help us out identifying which profile out of those thousands of profiles is to be looked into. For this I suggest that you use following formats of different social media platforms.

 Twitter

Add [User ID] after your post

Example: Just noticing some drop in quality of signals on my IPTV . What could be the reason?[1122543100]

Other Social Media

Add [User ID > City > your email ID] after your post

 Example: Just noticing some drop in quality of signals on my IPTV . What could be the reason? [1122543100 > Delhi > yourmail@yourmail.com]

We did learn a lot about the social media but the reward was being able to come closer to our customers. I really want to thank you all for such support. Help us help you better because we believe in delivering best to our customers.

Bringing some thing new and extending your service is something that we believe in. We are going ahead another step by bringing two new channels in the iControl's channel list. Recently with the efforts of our content team we added Discovery Science and Discovery Turbo in Educational/Info channel list. Discovery Turbo is everything auto. A complete channel for users who love the rush of all things motorized. And on Discovery science you learn about outer space, leading scientific exploration, new technology, earth science and a lot more. The channel numbers may vary according to location,

 Both the channels are available in both BSNL and MTNL cities & in all packages. We got a great response after announcing the new channel addition and are thankful to everyone for staying connected with us on social media. For those who are still unable to watch the channels we would request you to switch OFF your STB once and then switch it ON.

Keep watching iControl Plus and do write your suggestions, demands and queries on Facebook / Twitter or call us on customer care.

It was 18 months back when my Ex Boss called me and asked me if I am interested in joining him at Aksh. What excited me then was the opertunity to work  for VAS applications solutions on IPTV platform. Me being a techno operations guy have alway looked for new technologies and platforms. IPTV being a platform which I knew since sometime and the one which I always was deeply convinced as the must have technology for future. The challenge was to work for a startup in the domain. But the incentive, of being able to establish something which will be first the status symbol and then the most sought after technology, was bigger than the challenge. In fact while discussing my move with one of my colleagues she asked "Are you sure?". I said that the feeling of being first one to work on an emrging technology is great enough satisfaction to try it once and see if we can take it to a level in next 2-3 years time.

With this intention I joined Aksh and then started the whole learning curve. I have worked for and developed a lot of ecommerce applications, mainly web applications. Now I had to understand the new technology called IPTV. It all started with reading the manuals of IP-based entertainment solution the company had invested in. Understanding its Content Engine and Media console. First time I heard the terms like upstream and downstream. All the protocols used and Markups which are required. The applications developed till date were being seen in diffrent light. There were a lot of tags and funtions which were not available in the firmware and the inbuilt browser. Some of these were mentioned in the Documents I recieved when I joined this company while for other we had to our own lab testing. I remeber the first test for HTML tags. We created 7 simple HTML files and tried to make them work on the IPTV platform. It took us 1 complete day and gave us fare good understanding of the limitations of the platform we had to work on.

We based our work on all these learnings and created world's first Shopping mall on the IPTV platform. I cant express the feeling when I called up my Boss and informed the successful implementation of the fully integrated Shopping application. After that it was only the way forward. We designed the Education application for our platform, enhanced the shopping experience for our customers with the launch of next version shopping application. We also enhanced our video classifieds applications. One thing that always gave me a sense of achievement is that for many things we were the first ones to do. A lot of the things are improved and a lot is still to be done. The technical team made the firmware upgradations and simplified the interface to make it more user friendly. Today after seeing all this and being instrumental to a lot of innovations I really feel enriched.
 

Being a new technology, IPTV is growing slowly in India. People are using it and are admiring its features too. My observations since the time I am here in the industry brought conclusion that, people do get confused between IPTV and DTH. For a common man both are the TV services. While technically speaking, DTH & IPTV are two different sides of a coin. DTH (Direct to the Home), uses a dish antenna, connected with a Set Top Box (STB) and then the STB is connected with your TV set. IPTV (Internet Protocol TV) uses no dish antennas and thus there are no issues of dish placement, disturbance during bad weather etc. IPTV is a technology where your data packets pass through a secure channel and reach your TV set via your broadband line.

Watching only TV channels on your TV is no more the trend. The advance technology provides you games on TV and various applications like learning English. IPTV comes with something more, not only the applications, games but the features of IPTV are so fascinating that you will be completely entertained. The iControl site has all these features mentioned with details. You can Play-Pause-Rewind LIVE TV. You get all your shows of up to last 7 days available on Chill ( The iControl IPTV feature). So unlike DTH you don't have to press your remote button in order to record your favorite show. Not only this IPTV has all these shows on its own server, so you get no STB memory space full issues. DTH says it provides a recording of only 90 hours (approx), but if you count the IPTV Chill recording hours, they will be more than 10,000 hours. Watching the shows on Chill is completely secure, easy to watch and fast. You never get problems of loosing the saved shows. Talking about DTH if the memory is full, you cannot record a show until and unless the previous recorded show is deleted.Talking about the cost, IPTV is really affordable for common people of India. The difference between DTH's cost and iControl IPTV is a lot.

With two major problems; disturbance due to bad weather and recording limitations DTH looses the race with IPTV. And when IPTV is coming with some new generation services after the launch of FTTH (Fibre to the Home) people will surely be understanding what IPTV has.

Watching the Television is the favorite pastime for most of us. We can easily loose the track of time and at time the place also. Its really an engrossing medium. We are so used to of watching television and that's why we easily overlook the graphics of television. In fact some of the designers who design websites would be amazed to know how different TV designing is from web designing. Creating graphics for television is a far tough job than website graphics.

Watching TV from a distance of 6-7 feet hides the depth of screen design from the viewers. While websites on your computer screen are viewed from a distance of 1 or 2 feet maximum. Watching from such a small distance makes even a single minor mistake noticeable. In fact, the interlacing on a television display makes it hard to view at close range. This means that controls and text must be over sized so they can be read from a distance.

Low color reproduction fidelity also is a subject of concern. This means that the colors look different on the television screen than they do on a computer screen on top of this they are not even displayed with a consistency. Some colors, especially those with a lot of red, tend to bleed, spilling into neighboring pixels and thus provide a blur looking pictures. This makes those colors bad choices for fine detail or text. Blues are the most stable colors and make good backgrounds. No wonder we see a lot of designs for the Television in all shades of blue.

Text is the most difficult part of the designs to handle while designing for TV. Interlacing flicker makes it real hard to read the text especially smaller text. The minimum size in my opinion for the text that can be used is 20 pixels if you are using simpler fonts. Arial is my favorite for all TV designs. Also it makes a big difference if you are rendering it as plain text or as image. But the small TV screen (640 x 495 px) restricts the amount of text (an graphics) you can show on the TV screen. It can display only 40 or 50 characters per line line when rendering as images Text rendering will increase it to approx. 60-70 characters. Websites have no bounds, no matter what color, what font you use. The limitation of screen space, limited display elements etc restrict the graphics use. Using the stylish, cool font types for websites makes them more attractive while TV graphics lack in the use of font styles.

Working and updating website is a task of few minutes but TV graphic frequent updates is a hectic procedure and quite difficult. No one prefers to update TV graphics that often how often you do it with websites. At the end would like to conclude that both designing are good at their place but web designing has a whole galaxy of options.