It varies but in general its 3mbps, it does fluctuate though. But it should make no difference! If he is happy to pay the extra cost, take out a 12 month contract then TalkTalk should be happy enough to do so as long as it's made clear that sometimes on demand might not work very well. He just wants a good quality PVR and use on demand occasionally.
If your Father want a good quality PVr, then maybe he is best to get something like the digitalstream No on demand or there was not when i used mine, it not been connected for a while, but the box itself is a good box for £180 and you don't have to take out silly long contracts to get it.
If your Father want a good quality PVr, then maybe he is best to get something like the digitalstream No on demand or there was not when i used mine, it not been connected for a while, but the box itself is a good box for £180 and you don't have to take out silly long contracts to get it.
Just had a look and the latest update will give you BBC iplayer. As i said it is a good PVR, I thought i better update mine and see if it still works as it not been used for over a year.
Been updated, now back in the box, just in case i want to use it again at some point.
On Demand is ok if it is at the right price and you got the broadband speed to cope with it, there are plenty of on Demand services, netflix and lovefilm being two of them. A cheap second hand Wii will do both now, if not worried about HD.
Developing that, 140,000 including the BT customers, plus god knows how many who bought their YouView boxes from shops. At least one definitely did because he is a friend of mine.
BT Vision has 770,000 subscribers, and has signed up another 60,000 to it's YouView service.
But the chances are they will loose some come August when you will, according to their website, need to have Infinity and an exchange capable of Multicast to get their sports channels.
But the chances are they will loose some come August when you will, according to their website, need to have Infinity and an exchange capable of Multicast to get their sports channels.
That's a restriction for new sports customers, existing customers should still be ok for now. They may well see an offer to replace ESPN UK by BT Sport 1. In the longer term, all premium channels for BT customers will be IPTV delivered. BT probably needs to have better Infinity coverage before it switches DTT customers off and will not want to lose sports customers.
Developing that, 140,000 including the BT customers, plus god knows how many who bought their YouView boxes from shops. At least one definitely did because he is a friend of mine.
A million YouView users by the end of the 2013 on current projections.
That's a restriction for new sports customers, existing customers should still be ok for now. They may well see an offer to replace ESPN UK by BT Sport 1. In the longer term, all premium channels for BT customers will be IPTV delivered. BT probably needs to have better Infinity coverage before it switches DTT customers off and will not want to lose sports customers.
I do hope you are right as the only thing that will keep me with BT Vision is the Premiership Rugby. Without that there are far better BB and phone packages out there.
Before I got Youview from TalkTalk, I used a Philips Freeview HD recorder and a Xbox 360.
With those I could get Lovefilm, Netflix, NowTV (the "on-demand" HD version on Xbox Live, not the awful "live" SD version Youview has), as well as the usual catch-up services and movie rentals. (oh, and not forgetting the games of course.)
The biggest let-down with Youview is the inability to record Sky channels. You have to plan your viewing around the start times (which is like a step back to the 1990s), and without even a hint of HD the picture quality is closer to VHS than DVD.
If you don't already have a Freeview HD recorder and a games console, then Youview might be worth a look. If you do, then don't bother, you wont miss anything (actually, you probably will because you can't record the Sky channels ).
Youview is OK, but it could be so much better, so for now I'll be going back to the Xbox 360 and my old HD recorder.
The biggest let-down with Youview is the inability to record Sky channels. You have to plan your viewing around the start times (which is like a step back to the 1990s),
TalkTalk say they're working on bringing a record function to the online channels in the future. Most of the programs I watch are repeated a few times over the week, so I rarely miss an episode.
and without even a hint of HD the picture quality is closer to VHS than DVD.
Before TalkTalk's Huawei YouView box, I was using a Humax HDR-FOX T2. The picture quality of the online channels using the Huawei it almost as good as the Freeview HD channels were on the Humax. If the picture quality you're getting is nearer to VHS, perhaps you broadband speed isn't fast enough.
If you don't already have a Freeview HD recorder and a games console, then Youview might be worth a look. If you do, then don't bother, you wont miss anything (actually, you probably will because you can't record the Sky channels ).
TalkTalk say they're working on bringing a record function to the online channels in the future. Most of the programs I watch are repeated a few times over the week, so I rarely miss an episode.
Before TalkTalk's Huawei YouView box, I was using a Humax HDR-FOX T2. The picture quality of the online channels using the Huawei it almost as good as the Freeview HD channels were on the Humax. If the picture quality you're getting is nearer to VHS, perhaps you broadband speed isn't fast enough.
There's nothing wrong with my connection, maybe it just looks bad on a large, properly calibrated screen. The ITV player is particularly poor, it almost looks as though the frame rate has been reduced to 15 or 20fps.
Before TalkTalk's Huawei YouView box, I was using a Humax HDR-FOX T2. The picture quality of the online channels using the Huawei it almost as good as the Freeview HD channels were on the Humax. If the picture quality you're getting is nearer to VHS, perhaps you broadband speed isn't fast enough.
Agreed. I watched a bit of Grey's Anatomy streaming on a TalkTalk YouView box and was impressed by the quality for SD.
Mine is connected through home plugs and they work fine. There is a lot of Internet-based stuff already available, and much more on the way apparently. LoveFilm Box Office is already there, along with various 'free gifts' (series of US TV shows in the main, but there is some Discovery, National Geographic and The Tudors also). Various boosts are also available that allow you to replicate as much or a as little of the Sky standard definition packages as you like (without actually dealing with Sky). I have heard that Sky HD is also coming, but no confirmation yet. Then there are the various catch-up services (BBC iPlayer, ITV Player, 4OD and Demand 5) plus NowTV and Milkshake.
Having experienced the evolution (or perhaps devolution) of this TV service from when it was Homechoice through to Tiscali and now TalkTalk, I thought I’d share my experiences (negative and positive). This entails some history of the service.
What isn’t often realised is that if you lived in the right area, Homechoice offered ten years ago a lot of what TalkTalk does now, but it was pure IPTV – the only option living in a flat with no Freeview reception. The basic package came with all the normal channels plus a few key extra ones at no extra cost, such as Fox and Comedy Central. The on-demand library was huge but spread about, and there was weekly catch up, ad-free, available with one button press from the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 channels. The picture quality was pretty bad though, and there was no HD or hard drive recording capability.
Then Tiscali bought Homechoice, and the transfer was seamless in terms of customer services/billing. They started to offer a package that has never been beaten in terms of price, but it was also never advertised, even when it went countrywide: £19.99/month for basic TV (including Comedy Central and Fox and later the basic Sky channels), 8Mb broadband, free evening and weekend calls to landlines, and the killer – INCLUSIVE line rental! They also provided a new recordable box with one IPTV tuner with all the linear channels (including catch up) and on demand, but also with two DTT tuners for extra channels and multi-recording. But the DTT and IPTV channels were properly integrated in the same listing, defaulting to IPTV when more than one viewing method was available. Picture quality also became very good when they starting encoding in mpeg4-avc. Unfortunately there was still no HD and the box was extremely noisy and slow to load, the on-demand library virtually dried up, and Catch-up was eventually limited to only BBC and Fox by the time TalkTalk closed the Tiscali TV service (and was by no means comprehensive for them).
Then TalkTalk bought Tiscali, and prices increased, but nothing changed in terms of the TV service. Then came the dreaded ‘Your current TV service is closing’ letter and migration was necessary. So here are my positives and negatives on the new service, and how it compares to the old ones:
NEGATIVES:
It works out more significantly more expensive than the initial Tiscali offering over all, with no extra channels included in the basic package or inclusive line rental - £35/month (with the Entertainment Boost at £10/month) once my loyalty discounts have expired, as opposed to a mere £20/month. The Entertainment Boost gives me the extra channels I want but I now have many I would never watch (MTV Base?).
Transition was painful – really painful, entailing being signed on to the wrong channel package (no IPTV channels for a month), incorrect bills, two engineer visits (first engineers, ironically called 'Bright Sparks', were very dim-witted and registered the box all wrong), endless calls to clueless customer services somewhere in Eastern Europe (thankfully freephone) and eventually only being resolved by threatening to leave and finally being able to talk to someone in England from Cancellations. I’m still hoping my bill for next month is correct.
All the main linear ‘YouView’ channels require an aerial – it’s basically Freeview – so this feels like a backwards step and won’t be an option for everyone. Picture quality has therefore reduced and can break up.
Catch up TV is now in a separate on-demand section and can’t be accessed from the relevant channel. The process is much more cumbersome and requires a lot more navigation of a slow system which often crashes. For the first time I am forced to watch ads which can’t be skipped for ITV and Channel 4. It doesn’t save your place in the programme, so if it crashes, which it does, you have to find your place all over again. You can’t now skip forward or back in set time increments, and the same applies to pausing and rewinding live TV. The menu is not intuitive or easy to navigate, so finding what you want to watch can be very time consuming.
No extra channels come in the basic package (they cost £10/month extra) and are instead stored in yet another separate menu called ‘TalkTalk Player’ (IPTV) instead of being conveniently integrated with the main channels. You can pause and rewind these channels but you can’t yet record them. It’s a cumbersome process navigating through a whole separate slow-to-load menu which doesn’t have channel numbers or catch up. Adult on-demand channels seem to have gone. The picture quality appears reduced. Feels like a backwards step again.
There doesn’t seem to be much in terms of other on-demand content, unless you are willing to pay (movies etc).
The whole menu system is very counter-intuitive, slow to load, confusing to interact with, and often crashes. When you quit On Demand or TalkTalk Player you can’t just press a channel number to go back to YouView, you have to enter the EPG and select a channel from there. It feels like Freeview with IPTV and Catch-up tagged on as an afterthought and not integrated – technologically regressive.
There are minor channels at the end of the YouView EPG that display the message: ‘You do not have a compatible Freeview HD device to watch this channel’ which rather raises the question what they are doing on my EPG in the first place.
POSITIVES:
HD channels are available for the first time on channels 101 – 104. These are the only channels that have comparable picture quality to the old Tiscali IPTV channels on my small TV.
The box is a lot quieter and the initial load is faster if you are not in eco-mode.
The Catch-up menu, although not integrated with the channels, is extensive in terms of content – there is a version of BBC IPlayer with the option to watch some programmes in HD (although others are poor picture quality and badly cropped). 4OD and ITV Player are also there, but they now have non-skippable ads, which I can't really put up with on a Catch-up service.
There seem to be good access features such as subtitles and audio description (I haven't tested these fully), and you can skip through Catch-up or live TV by scene.
Overall I would say that the negatives of the new service outweigh the positives in terms of where it has come from and where it is going. The whole thing feels ill thought out, and rather than building on the old Homechoice/Tiscali architecture, TalkTalk seem to have scrapped it in favour of piggybacking onto Freeview and thus regressed in terms of technology and service quality. If I don’t see improvements or price reductions/inclusion of extra channels in the basic package I may well leave TalkTalk TV at the end of my contract period.
Overall I would say that the negatives of the new service outweigh the positives in terms of where it has come from and where it is going. The whole thing feels ill thought out, and rather than building on the old Homechoice/Tiscali architecture, TalkTalk seem to have scrapped it in favour of piggybacking onto Freeview and thus regressed in terms of technology and service quality. If I don’t see improvements or price reductions/inclusion of extra channels in the basic package I may well leave TalkTalk TV at the end of my contract period.
You have to remember neither TalkTalk or BT have fully developed the platform yet. But the main bulk of the changes will come this year (expected July). So just give it some time, joshua321, then make your decision.
Transition was painful – really painful, entailing being signed on to the wrong channel package (no IPTV channels for a month), incorrect bills, two engineer visits (first engineers, ironically called 'Bright Sparks', were very dim-witted and registered the box all wrong), endless calls to clueless customer services somewhere in Eastern Europe (thankfully freephone) and eventually only being resolved by threatening to leave and finally being able to talk to someone in England from Cancellations. I’m still hoping my bill for next month is correct.
All the main linear ‘YouView’ channels require an aerial – it’s basically Freeview – so this feels like a backwards step and won’t be an option for everyone. Picture quality has therefore reduced and can break up.
Catch up TV is now in a separate on-demand section and can’t be accessed from the relevant channel. The process is much more cumbersome and requires a lot more navigation of a slow system which often crashes. For the first time I am forced to watch ads which can’t be skipped for ITV and Channel 4. It doesn’t save your place in the programme, so if it crashes, which it does, you have to find your place all over again. You can’t now skip forward or back in set time increments, and the same applies to pausing and rewinding live TV. The menu is not intuitive or easy to navigate, so finding what you want to watch can be very time consuming.
No extra channels come in the basic package (they cost £10/month extra) and are instead stored in yet another separate menu called ‘TalkTalk Player’ (IPTV) instead of being conveniently integrated with the main channels. You can pause and rewind these channels but you can’t yet record them. It’s a cumbersome process navigating through a whole separate slow-to-load menu which doesn’t have channel numbers or catch up. Adult on-demand channels seem to have gone. The picture quality appears reduced. Feels like a backwards step again.
There doesn’t seem to be much in terms of other on-demand content, unless you are willing to pay (movies etc).
The whole menu system is very counter-intuitive, slow to load, confusing to interact with, and often crashes. When you quit On Demand or TalkTalk Player you can’t just press a channel number to go back to YouView, you have to enter the EPG and select a channel from there. It feels like Freeview with IPTV and Catch-up tagged on as an afterthought and not integrated – technologically regressive.
There are minor channels at the end of the YouView EPG that display the message: ‘You do not have a compatible Freeview HD device to watch this channel’ which rather raises the question what they are doing on my EPG in the first place.
You can't really blame the YouView platform if TalkTalk's installation guy did not do a very good job. That is a TalkTalk customer service problem.
Yes, it does require an aerial because YouView is actually a development of Freeview that enables it to break clear of the restrictions imposed by Freeview's limited bandwidth.
I can't compare it with Home Choice or Tiscali TV because I never had either. I can state, however, that the picture quality on my TV is excellent. No complaints whatsoever. Before anybody mentions that I must be easily pleased, I am not. I am very fussy indeed about picture quality. That is why I did not choose the biggest screen I could afford. I was fully aware that the bigger the screen, the more out of its depth standard definition tends to look, while HD just takes it in its stride. I ended up with a 39" screen, but with outstanding picture quality.
The catch-up services can be accessed from the programme guide. It goes backwards as well as forwards and you can jump by a day at a time, so you don't need to scroll all the way. Find the programme you want and, if it is available on the appropriate catch-up service, press OK and it starts. Any digibox is, in essence, a small and specialised computer and, like any other computer, can crash from time to time. It isn't a problem I have suffered from significantly, however. I have accessed ITV Player and 4OD on my computer as well, and you can't skip through the commercials there either. That isn't unique to YouView.
A forthcoming software update will enable recording of the Internet-based channels in the TalkTalk Player, thus answering one of your major reservations. Another will place these channels in the main programme guide, so making accessing them much simpler. On demand adult channels haven't gone. They were never there. There is a place for them in the on demand section, but nobody has signed up yet, I daresay somebody will sooner or later as the platform grows.
The other on demand content is increasing. Digital Theatre has just launched and LoveFilm Box Office now offers HD as well as SD. YouView have indicated that much more is on the way. Digital Theatre (online versions of premium stage productions in SD and HD) are pay-per-view and costs about the same as LoveFilm Box Office. No doubt those people who want everything for nothing will complain about that, but these services have to pay for themselves somehow. There are only four ways that I know of: licence fee (BBC only), subscription, pay-per-view or advertising.
You are entitled to your opinion, of course, but I think you are being a bit harsh on a platform that is still only a matter of months old and developing. By the time that your contract period expires. you may find that all of your points are answered. Time will tell.
Comments
If your Father want a good quality PVr, then maybe he is best to get something like the digitalstream No on demand or there was not when i used mine, it not been connected for a while, but the box itself is a good box for £180 and you don't have to take out silly long contracts to get it.
Ok thank you for the advice
So how are you finding Now TV, deznottsuk?
Just had a look and the latest update will give you BBC iplayer. As i said it is a good PVR, I thought i better update mine and see if it still works as it not been used for over a year.
Been updated, now back in the box, just in case i want to use it again at some point.
On Demand is ok if it is at the right price and you got the broadband speed to cope with it, there are plenty of on Demand services, netflix and lovefilm being two of them. A cheap second hand Wii will do both now, if not worried about HD.
Loving it. good choice. Whether I would pay £15 pm after my 3 month £8.99 offer is another matter! I dont think I will be doing>
80,000 TV subscribers at 31st December 2012 with growing momentum in Q4.
c30% of TV subscribers new to TalkTalk with balance upsold from Essentials and Plus.
http://www.talktalkgroup.com/press/press-releases/2013/05-02-2013.aspxI know it's early days for TalkTalk TV, but how does 80,000 compare with BT Vision?
BT Vision has 770,000 subscribers, and has signed up another 60,000 to it's YouView service.
But the chances are they will loose some come August when you will, according to their website, need to have Infinity and an exchange capable of Multicast to get their sports channels.
I do hope you are right as the only thing that will keep me with BT Vision is the Premiership Rugby. Without that there are far better BB and phone packages out there.
With those I could get Lovefilm, Netflix, NowTV (the "on-demand" HD version on Xbox Live, not the awful "live" SD version Youview has), as well as the usual catch-up services and movie rentals. (oh, and not forgetting the games of course.)
The biggest let-down with Youview is the inability to record Sky channels. You have to plan your viewing around the start times (which is like a step back to the 1990s), and without even a hint of HD the picture quality is closer to VHS than DVD.
If you don't already have a Freeview HD recorder and a games console, then Youview might be worth a look. If you do, then don't bother, you wont miss anything (actually, you probably will because you can't record the Sky channels
Youview is OK, but it could be so much better, so for now I'll be going back to the Xbox 360 and my old HD recorder.
TalkTalk say they're working on bringing a record function to the online channels in the future. Most of the programs I watch are repeated a few times over the week, so I rarely miss an episode.
Before TalkTalk's Huawei YouView box, I was using a Humax HDR-FOX T2. The picture quality of the online channels using the Huawei it almost as good as the Freeview HD channels were on the Humax. If the picture quality you're getting is nearer to VHS, perhaps you broadband speed isn't fast enough.
Can you record the online channels on an Xbox?
Good, the sooner the better.
There's nothing wrong with my connection, maybe it just looks bad on a large, properly calibrated screen. The ITV player is particularly poor, it almost looks as though the frame rate has been reduced to 15 or 20fps.
You wouldn't need to since Sky's NowTV on the Xbox is "on-demand" as well as live.
Agreed. I watched a bit of Grey's Anatomy streaming on a TalkTalk YouView box and was impressed by the quality for SD.
ITV player looks rubbish on most devices, not just YouView. I was talking about the picture quality of the paid-for programming.
Also, what Internet TV channels are available?
cheers
What isn’t often realised is that if you lived in the right area, Homechoice offered ten years ago a lot of what TalkTalk does now, but it was pure IPTV – the only option living in a flat with no Freeview reception. The basic package came with all the normal channels plus a few key extra ones at no extra cost, such as Fox and Comedy Central. The on-demand library was huge but spread about, and there was weekly catch up, ad-free, available with one button press from the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 channels. The picture quality was pretty bad though, and there was no HD or hard drive recording capability.
Then Tiscali bought Homechoice, and the transfer was seamless in terms of customer services/billing. They started to offer a package that has never been beaten in terms of price, but it was also never advertised, even when it went countrywide: £19.99/month for basic TV (including Comedy Central and Fox and later the basic Sky channels), 8Mb broadband, free evening and weekend calls to landlines, and the killer – INCLUSIVE line rental! They also provided a new recordable box with one IPTV tuner with all the linear channels (including catch up) and on demand, but also with two DTT tuners for extra channels and multi-recording. But the DTT and IPTV channels were properly integrated in the same listing, defaulting to IPTV when more than one viewing method was available. Picture quality also became very good when they starting encoding in mpeg4-avc. Unfortunately there was still no HD and the box was extremely noisy and slow to load, the on-demand library virtually dried up, and Catch-up was eventually limited to only BBC and Fox by the time TalkTalk closed the Tiscali TV service (and was by no means comprehensive for them).
Then TalkTalk bought Tiscali, and prices increased, but nothing changed in terms of the TV service. Then came the dreaded ‘Your current TV service is closing’ letter and migration was necessary. So here are my positives and negatives on the new service, and how it compares to the old ones:
NEGATIVES:
It works out more significantly more expensive than the initial Tiscali offering over all, with no extra channels included in the basic package or inclusive line rental - £35/month (with the Entertainment Boost at £10/month) once my loyalty discounts have expired, as opposed to a mere £20/month. The Entertainment Boost gives me the extra channels I want but I now have many I would never watch (MTV Base?).
Transition was painful – really painful, entailing being signed on to the wrong channel package (no IPTV channels for a month), incorrect bills, two engineer visits (first engineers, ironically called 'Bright Sparks', were very dim-witted and registered the box all wrong), endless calls to clueless customer services somewhere in Eastern Europe (thankfully freephone) and eventually only being resolved by threatening to leave and finally being able to talk to someone in England from Cancellations. I’m still hoping my bill for next month is correct.
All the main linear ‘YouView’ channels require an aerial – it’s basically Freeview – so this feels like a backwards step and won’t be an option for everyone. Picture quality has therefore reduced and can break up.
Catch up TV is now in a separate on-demand section and can’t be accessed from the relevant channel. The process is much more cumbersome and requires a lot more navigation of a slow system which often crashes. For the first time I am forced to watch ads which can’t be skipped for ITV and Channel 4. It doesn’t save your place in the programme, so if it crashes, which it does, you have to find your place all over again. You can’t now skip forward or back in set time increments, and the same applies to pausing and rewinding live TV. The menu is not intuitive or easy to navigate, so finding what you want to watch can be very time consuming.
No extra channels come in the basic package (they cost £10/month extra) and are instead stored in yet another separate menu called ‘TalkTalk Player’ (IPTV) instead of being conveniently integrated with the main channels. You can pause and rewind these channels but you can’t yet record them. It’s a cumbersome process navigating through a whole separate slow-to-load menu which doesn’t have channel numbers or catch up. Adult on-demand channels seem to have gone. The picture quality appears reduced. Feels like a backwards step again.
There doesn’t seem to be much in terms of other on-demand content, unless you are willing to pay (movies etc).
The whole menu system is very counter-intuitive, slow to load, confusing to interact with, and often crashes. When you quit On Demand or TalkTalk Player you can’t just press a channel number to go back to YouView, you have to enter the EPG and select a channel from there. It feels like Freeview with IPTV and Catch-up tagged on as an afterthought and not integrated – technologically regressive.
There are minor channels at the end of the YouView EPG that display the message: ‘You do not have a compatible Freeview HD device to watch this channel’ which rather raises the question what they are doing on my EPG in the first place.
POSITIVES:
HD channels are available for the first time on channels 101 – 104. These are the only channels that have comparable picture quality to the old Tiscali IPTV channels on my small TV.
The box is a lot quieter and the initial load is faster if you are not in eco-mode.
The Catch-up menu, although not integrated with the channels, is extensive in terms of content – there is a version of BBC IPlayer with the option to watch some programmes in HD (although others are poor picture quality and badly cropped). 4OD and ITV Player are also there, but they now have non-skippable ads, which I can't really put up with on a Catch-up service.
There seem to be good access features such as subtitles and audio description (I haven't tested these fully), and you can skip through Catch-up or live TV by scene.
Overall I would say that the negatives of the new service outweigh the positives in terms of where it has come from and where it is going. The whole thing feels ill thought out, and rather than building on the old Homechoice/Tiscali architecture, TalkTalk seem to have scrapped it in favour of piggybacking onto Freeview and thus regressed in terms of technology and service quality. If I don’t see improvements or price reductions/inclusion of extra channels in the basic package I may well leave TalkTalk TV at the end of my contract period.
You have to remember neither TalkTalk or BT have fully developed the platform yet. But the main bulk of the changes will come this year (expected July). So just give it some time, joshua321, then make your decision.
You can't really blame the YouView platform if TalkTalk's installation guy did not do a very good job. That is a TalkTalk customer service problem.
Yes, it does require an aerial because YouView is actually a development of Freeview that enables it to break clear of the restrictions imposed by Freeview's limited bandwidth.
I can't compare it with Home Choice or Tiscali TV because I never had either. I can state, however, that the picture quality on my TV is excellent. No complaints whatsoever. Before anybody mentions that I must be easily pleased, I am not. I am very fussy indeed about picture quality. That is why I did not choose the biggest screen I could afford. I was fully aware that the bigger the screen, the more out of its depth standard definition tends to look, while HD just takes it in its stride. I ended up with a 39" screen, but with outstanding picture quality.
The catch-up services can be accessed from the programme guide. It goes backwards as well as forwards and you can jump by a day at a time, so you don't need to scroll all the way. Find the programme you want and, if it is available on the appropriate catch-up service, press OK and it starts. Any digibox is, in essence, a small and specialised computer and, like any other computer, can crash from time to time. It isn't a problem I have suffered from significantly, however. I have accessed ITV Player and 4OD on my computer as well, and you can't skip through the commercials there either. That isn't unique to YouView.
A forthcoming software update will enable recording of the Internet-based channels in the TalkTalk Player, thus answering one of your major reservations. Another will place these channels in the main programme guide, so making accessing them much simpler. On demand adult channels haven't gone. They were never there. There is a place for them in the on demand section, but nobody has signed up yet, I daresay somebody will sooner or later as the platform grows.
The other on demand content is increasing. Digital Theatre has just launched and LoveFilm Box Office now offers HD as well as SD. YouView have indicated that much more is on the way. Digital Theatre (online versions of premium stage productions in SD and HD) are pay-per-view and costs about the same as LoveFilm Box Office. No doubt those people who want everything for nothing will complain about that, but these services have to pay for themselves somehow. There are only four ways that I know of: licence fee (BBC only), subscription, pay-per-view or advertising.
You are entitled to your opinion, of course, but I think you are being a bit harsh on a platform that is still only a matter of months old and developing. By the time that your contract period expires. you may find that all of your points are answered. Time will tell.