Astro Blows

14 December, 2007 at 2:44 pm (Mumblings) (Astro, satelite TV, sucks, TV)

I hate Astro. For those not living in Malaysia, Astro is a satellite television broadcast company that has recently gone homo with its channel arrangement. For that, I’m gonna give them a new name:

I came back home last week after spending almost 5 months in a god forsaken middle of nowhere and television deprived. After getting some rest, I turned on the TV to catch up on some good old fashioned mindless fun. I pressed 17, 50, 70 and 71 on Asstro’s remote and the only thing I got was ‘channel not found’. Wtf?

Apparently, some smarty ass in Asstro revamped the the channel guide when I wasn’t around. This just pisses me off. Before, I knew where every one of my channel is, 11 is Travel and living, 17 is AXN, 50 is Discovery, and 71 is MTV. Now every channel’s changed to a new slot which sucks ass because all channel now has 3 digits instead of 2.

What the hell’s wrong with those Asstro’s donkey raping shit eaters? Why must they changed something that worked? Maybe you’re saying “Unig, it’s just one extra digit. Maybe they have too much channels already and needed more numbers LOL!”. I did some calculations and found out that Asstro has a total of about 92 channels with all packages including shitty ones like Supersport that charged losers 500 bucks just so they can get live broadcast of the world’s most boring sport – cricket.

And I’ve also taken the liberty to exclude 17 digital radio channels because frankly, I don’t give a shit where they are placed. Hell, they can put all radio channels at channel 980 till 999 because I DON’T USE ASSTRO TO LISTEN TO RADIO. Instead I use this device called a RADIO. Only losers use TVs to LISTEN to RADIO.

Let’s not even start with the picture quality. Despite all the so-called digital broadcast, Asstro’s picture truly sucks plenty of asses. They are so shitty that Sony has to come up with an Astro Enhancement Mode for its Bravia line of High-Def TVs. In fact, most electronic stores refuse to use Asstro when doing demos with TVs because if they did it would be the television equivalent of watching your balls under a microscope. Lack lustre color, grainy picture, slow fps, and sometimes pixelated picture makes me wonder if I’m watching satellite TV or a pirated VCD. Don’t believe me? Try comparing terrestrial channels (TV1, TV2, TV3, NTV7) using normal VHF/UHF antenna to the TV1, 2, and 3 from Asstro.

I digressed; actually my beef with Asstro is still the shitty channel arrangement. Imagine this, say I want to change channels from Travel & Living to Discovery and then to MTV. With the old arrangement, I’d press 11, 50 and then 71 on the remote. Simple enough. But since Asstro drunk too much ass juice, doing the same thing would require me to press 707, 551, followed by 713. An extra 3 presses which waste time, energy (as in remote’s battery) and most often than not I’ll fumble with the buttons a few time before getting to the right channel.

I channel surf a lot; so on average I’ll switch channels about 2 or 3 times an hour. Do the math and you can see how much energy I wasted trying to figure out which channels to press and re-press because I fumble sometimes.

The most annoying of all has to be the re-runs. Don’t even get me started on this one. Half a year ago AXN showed Jumanji and NOW they’re showing it again even though TV2 had just screened it last week. They’re also doing re-runs for CSI and that’s just for AXN, god knows what other re-runs they’re doing in other channels. You’d probably say that Asstro doesn’t own most of the channels hence not being able to control what were broadcasted, but shouldn’t Asstro being one of the biggest CUSTOMER have any say in it?

And we’re paying for this shit? I wouldn’t have written this glowing review had Asstro not jack up its subscription rate at its whim that prompted me to cancel some of the packages. How’s that MiTV going on? Haven’t heard much of them.