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Anonymous User
Not applicable

5.1 Audio output ??

Hi there ....

Having had a lengthy 'web chat' with one of The NOW help persons, they assured me that the Black Now box should output a 5.1 Dolby signal .... Which I was failing to get, so .... After several hours of fiddling with settings on both my AV amp & resetting the Now box a couple of times, I'm still not convinced a 5.1 output is happening.

Within the settings/audio menu I've tried both the 'auto detect' ..... Which did as it said & recognised the HDMI could carry DD and DTS .... And also manually set the audio at DD (along with all the other settings) but alas all that is being fed from the Now box appears to be stereo.

 

Has anyone out there managed to configure a 5.1 output & inform if I'm missing something really simple & stupid !

Thanks in advance for any info

Cheers

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION
Anonymous User
Not applicable

@Anonymous User

 

NOW TV only supply stereo audio.  Hopefully 5.1 is something on their list for the future, especially moviesSmiley Happy

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173 REPLIES 173
Anonymous User
Not applicable

That's a pretty pointless response to be honest. Sky have a bunch of exclusive deals, so it's not as if you can just go away and watch Game of Thrones on Netflix in 4K HDR with 5.1 audio if you want to. 

 


@Anonymous User wrote:

Why do you continue to moan and groan. If you are not satisfied, just leave. 




ukbobboy
Legend

@Anonymous User @Anonymous User @Anonymous User

 

Hi MB

 

You know, I totally agree with your post, @Anonymous User response is pointless and adds nothing to the debate.  And if you have read through this thread, you will see that I have differed with @Anonymous User on several view points. However, I would never tell a contributor to leave the forum just because I disagree with him.

 

Also, @Anonymous User has every right to campaign for better facilities if he wants to and only the moderators can bar him if they feel he is posting something inappropriate, as he is not then he has just as much right to be here as anyone else. 

 

In all honesty @Anonymous User, if you have nothing to say then say nothing.

 

 

UK Bob

4268
Legend 5
Legend 5

@ukbobboy  apparently the pink box will have 7.1 surround sound and thought control  😉  Aim high girls and boys and you might just hit the floor 🙂

Please take a moment to click thanks or marked as solution if this answered your question. I am a community contributor and pop on when I can.
Anonymous User
Not applicable

Hello

 

I agree with you, my comment was pretty basic.

 

Why is there been no movement regarding 5.1 sound at all?  Is this been asked to be put in the "Ideas" section and voted on? And if not, can it be put up for consideration?

 

Bob, I apologise for my for my crass comment.

 

Dave

ukbobboy
Legend

@Anonymous User

 

Hi Dave

 

Lets draw a line under this episode and move on, I hope to debate with you in the near future and, whether we agree or disagree, we can still remain cordial.

 

 

UK Bob

 

PS.  I've not seen the "5.1 sound and 1080" suggestion in the ideas section, I guess someone will have to sponsor the idea.

Anonymous User
Not applicable

Colonels! How are thee all!

 

It’s charming that Hobbielancie calls me a moaning and groaning complainer who should “leave”, yet it is my homeboy UKBobBoy to whom he apologises. What a woooorld we live in.

 

Now then, I’ve been thinking a lot about stuff, and my prognostication about the future of Now TV is wavering. It’s been five years since the service launched and it’s hardly cornered the market. Now TV was too slow to penetrate the burgeoning smart television market, instead insisting on the purchasing of its set top boxes rather than launching appropriate apps for myriad brands. It lost out. Its market share is poor in comparison to competitors, and Now TV’s failure to solidify a brand personality has wounded its prospects. As reported, Sky Television as a whole is down 18% in market share in recent reporting.

 

Sky is shifting its entire package online soon, therefore, I predict, Now TV maybe ditched as a service within the next 12 to 15 months (perhaps even sooner). It makes no sense for it to keep going if Sky Cinema is going viral.

 

Now TV struggled to keep up with the times. The assumption was that existing Hollywood movie content would be enough, but we live in an increasingly complex market. There is great complacency and Sky/ Now is destroying itself.

 

The consumer holds the aces nowadays. This ain’t 1993 no more.

 

I kiss you on both cheeks.

ukbobboy
Legend

@Anonymous User

 

Hi Irf

 

Your back and blazing with both guns, you know I'v read your analysis and I totally disagree with parts of it, not because I have any factual evidence but because of how I've seen NowTV operate in the niche market they occupy. 

 

First, you said, "Now TV was too slow to penetrate the burgeoning smart television market....". NowTV is NOT in the Smart Television market, i.e. there is no NowTV TV set on sale like there is various models of Samsung and LG smart TV's on sale, NowTV is in the Internet streaming TV market which really did not exist until NowTV came along.  

 

I will acknowledge that Roku and Western Digital had set-top streaming boxes available but, apart from the BBC iplayer (or it's forerunner), they had little or no UK content.  It was NowTV that consolidated and made the niche market it now occupies.

 

However, just because it virtually made the UK market that does not mean that this market will belong exclusively to NowTV, to keep a tech market a tech company has to continually test and the market it is in or it will end up like KODAK and myriad others tech companies that are now just historical footnotes.

 

I believe NowTV is keeping up with the tech market it is in because if it moves too fast, i.e. ahead of the market, which can be dangerous because other tech companies that shot ahead of the game have gone bust.

 

Second, you also said, "Sky is shifting its entire package online soon.....Now TV maybe ditched as a service within the next 12 to 15 months (perhaps even sooner)". I have said before, in another thread, that if NowTV is ditched I, for one, will not naturally migrate over to Sky and probably will ditch online TV altogether. And I believe there are other NowTV customers out there that feel the same way.

 

Finally, you said, "Now TV struggled to keep up with the times", I am somewhat skeptical about this statement because Roku is the company that is making the tech advances in it's set-top boxes and NowTV buys in the modified results.

 

You know, I think your summation of events are logical but ultimately wrong, but, as in all things, time will tell.

 

 

UK Bob 

 

Anonymous User
Not applicable

 

@ukbobboy

 

 

You got me sort of wrong, brother. What I meant to say is that Now TV was very slow in rolling out its app for various smart television brands. Netflix et al were all over it, Now TV weren’t – placing more faith in consumers buying its set-top box for Now TV whereas they ought to have developed, launched and distributed the smart app quicker.

 

They should not have vested so much faith in the uptake of Roku and Western Digital boxes. I have had a Samsung smart television since 2015 but Now TV launched an app for it late last year, aeons after Netflix and Amazon Prime, both of the latter streaming in more advanced picture and sound offerings. Now TV was late to the feast and arrived with Babycham while the rest were swigging on Veuve Clicquot. Not a good move, bro, especially when streaming via smart televisions is more ubiquitous. Mate, I remember back in 2006 when a work colleague was watching Poltergeist in our office via his LoveFilm account, thus indicating the actuality that streaming movies has been founded more by Amazon (they owned the company) than anyone else before them.

 

Mate, it’s a competitive market out there. The huge market loss endured by Sky last quarter demonstrates that. Customers want flexibility but they also want the best quality at the most generous price.

 

I love cinema, UK Bob. I think that I am a dying breed. Our film culture has been devalued. It’s become populated with franchise fodder, with meaningful films having been largely excised, as they are no longer deemed viable. I do believe that Now TV, with its cornucopia of content, should shame its competitors by making a huge deal of how it celebrates cinema. They should commission filmmakers to curate movie viewlists. They should advertise in cinemas extolling its personal cinematic worthiness, where the greatest movies are presented in the best ways available.

 

Like a gangsta rapper, I’m just spittin’ here. I’m just spittin’.

 

ukbobboy
Legend

@Anonymous User

 

You have got me, I just cannot reply to your last post, I guess that it's mainly because I've just had a beer and I'm chillin' to some sweet chilled music (Craig David's Greatest Hits).

 

All I can really say is that I too love films and music and it's NowTV and their little black box that has allowed me to enjoy both as and when I want to (although I've got to provide my own beer Smiley Happy). 

 

However, there is one small point, you say that NowTV came late to the party, I say they were right on time because there was no party before, just players seeing if the party actually existed.

 

Still, I will continue to enjoy what I've got and not worry (too much) about whether Sky/NowTV can keep their market share.

 

 

UK Bob

 

Anonymous User
Not applicable
It's simple.... Because they only care about money... Worse quality means more money for them.. I've said it many times that this service is a complete rip off, the picture definitely is not HD it's SD and the no DD5.1 is absolutely ridiculous... If you watch on a TV you won't really notice but I like to watch in surround sound and no DD5.1 just makes the movies sound bad and less enjoyable... The audio is just terrible everything sounds squashed.

A lot of people on this thread are saying movies on TV aren't in 5.1 which is just not true... ITV yes.. All the others are nearly always in DD5.1... I use a TiVo box and can always choose the audio track which is either stero or DD5.1... Even a lot of TV shows are as well.

Same goes for Netflix and Amazon... Netflix pretty much everything is 5.1... Amazon a lot is 5.1

Now TV is twice the price of the competition and offers quality from a decade ago.... You can get better quality for free