Quality issues on Sky Sports - some kind of patterned overlay?

[SweetBlitz]

If your using Now TV stick, then I would fully recommend ditching this in place for a Amazon fire stick. Much more reliable than Now TV sticks.

@gavs82008 Does it have a 30 minute pause?   I don’t have any reliability issue with my Now TV sticks.

[gavs82008]

@SweetBlitz 

The Live pause is only for Now TV devices if I am not mistaken. 

[FlashBlack]

@gavs82008 

Can you confirm you don't get the patterned overlay when using a FireTV Stick?

I made a thread about this issue over in the Everything Sports section, see thread

Blotchy / Blocky Picture On Sports Channels.

I have had multiple back and forth emails with support about this, they have acknowledged the issue and said it would be fixed. It obviously hasn't been so went back to them, reply this time was we can't see a problem. They clearly don't have a clue whats going on.

My dad has a NowTV stick on a <40 inch Panasonic TV this issue is present but not as noticeable as through my NowTV stick on a 50 inch Panasonic. The problem is also there when i watch through a Youview box, it actually appears worse through this.

[branflakes]

hi, yes just looked at your thread, looks like we have the same exact issue.

i had the same experience with support as you did. 

it's definitely not to do with the software on newer tv's because i have an older tv. 

i am not going to purchase a third party product (firestick) just to be able to use NowTV in an acceptable way. i would be tempted if it also had live pause & rewind, but since it doesn't, i'm going to pester nowtv til this is resolved.

[SweetBlitz]

When I pause on the Now TV stick I see the blotchy image, but when I play it disappears.

I can’t do it right now, but it would be worthwhile putting some images up.

[branflakes]

yes, that blotchy image when pausing is the source of the issue. if you look at the original post of this topic, i have a picture of the pause screen that you describe.

the problem for me & others seems to be that when resuming the content, the blotchy image doesn't fully go away. you can still see it when the football plays, especially on the green pitch, and it ruins the quality of the stream. 

this makes me think it's a nowtv software bug rather than anything else - or the way our tv's are interacting with what the nowtv software puts out. 

it's as though the opacity of that blotchy image is turned down to 5% or something when resuming content instead of fully turning off. 

[SweetBlitz]

@branflakes 
That’s what is see on the screen when paused, but no issue when it plays.  What does it look like when playing?

[branflakes]

here's a little video to show it:

https://streamable.com/ztd3xi

you can see it clearest around the halfway line at the top around 0:33. when the camera pans, you can see that there are semi-transparent blobs that stay in the same position. it doesn't show up particularly well on this video but i can assure you that it makes the stream look noticeably poor quality.

[SweetBlitz]

@branflakes yes, I see it.  Not noticed that on either of my TVs.  Will take a closer look tonight.

[FlashBlack]

@branflakes 

Agreed, we shouldn't have to purchase a 3rd party stick to avoid the issue but i would be tempted if it did cure the problem. I am going to check my Samsung TV again tonight see if the problem shows up direct through the app on that.

SweetBlitz's reply makes me wonder if this is an issue on every NowTV stream no matter the device or TV used. Various factors seem to make it more or less noticable but there non the less. Maybe the vast majority of people haven't noticed it or aren't bothered by it.

I shall be kicking off my complaint again.