Telstra launched its Apple TV and Google Chromecast competitor, Telstra TV, late last week with much fanfare: hundreds of invited guest were feted with beer, wine, champagne, oysters and the device itself, which goes on sale to the general public on October 27 for $109.
At launch it has 15 streaming services, some free, some paid. They include Presto and Netflix, as well as a number of television catch-up services including SBS on Demand, Plus7 and 9JumpIn. In addition, Australian streaming service Stan will be available in November.
Conspicuous by its absence, and no mention was made at the launch, was the ABC iView service, but CDN understands it is coming soon.
The unit is supposed to be for Telstra broadband customers only, and it asks for your Telstra broadband account username and password during set-up. However we were able to skip that and following the instructions to register at www.telstra.com/tv, create an account and be able to activate the device, at least for free services like SBS On Demand.
However this was where we encountered the first hiccup in the supposedly easy set-up procedure. The password required appears to be a minimum of eight characters, letters and numbers and upper and lower case but there is no information to indicate this.
If your password is not compliant, it just says your password is invalid!
We had a bigger problem trying to set up the unit’s Wi-Fi. Our router runs two Wi-Fi networks: 802.11b/g/n at 2.4GHz and 802.11a/n/ac at 5GHz.
(We were forced to scrap our old 2.4GHz-only router because that band is so congested that we could not reliably stream video to the TV.)
According to its specs, the Roku 2 box used for Telstra TV supports 802.11b/g/n “dual band” but although our 5GHz network showed up, we could only get it to connect to the 2.4GHz network. – Stuart Corner
