BSkyB have seemingly suffered from a customer imposed failure, where a certain percentage of boxes are suffering a severe code failure after a new code download. What was the certain percentage? Those customers of a low spec PVR that have undertaken a home disk upgrade. This was low spec as it is one of the older versions of the Sky+ with a small 40GB Hard disk – popular for the upgrader since disks are so low cost these days.
So whose fault? Sky or the customer? Well it does not really matter as the real loser is Sky with the bad press it has received. Could it have been avoided? Yes, considering it is well known that these units are being upgraded in reasonable numbers, and Sky could have thought outside the box that keeping its customers happy over-rides any hardware issues. Sky should remember that a customer is a customer as long as they pay for the subscription, regardless of what the hardware actually is, and it should be quite easy for Sky to introduce these sorts of ‘tame’ mods to the box population they develop and test for. Certainly the software developers should always take into account parametric changes to the hardware, but I suspect that this is a disk performance issue they had not fully took into account….