Earlier today we talked about how UK TV show Watchdog was running a scathing feature on the alleged high failure rate of the PlayStation 3. In a bid to shame Sony, the show parked a branded van outside the company's UK headquarters, offering free PS3 repairs to anybody suffering from a so-called "yellow light of death."
Yeah, that failed pretty hard.
Watchdog filmed eleven users getting their PS3 repaired by a crack team. It was later revealed that the "experts" had ended their good deed with four of the PS3s completely inoperable. In addition, the show stated that "thousands and thousands" of PS3s were broken around the UK, and went so far as to X-ray a console to show "trapped gas" within it, failing to explain exactly what the gas was, why it was there, and how it affected the machine's operation.
The show was also fond of factual inaccuracies, claiming the PS3 costs £400 and that repairs would amount to a further £528, both of which aren't true. Sony itself declined to appear on the show due to the report's tone, amidst fears that its defense would simply be ridiculed. As we stated in our earlier story, however, Sony Europe's Ray Maguire refuted the show's claims in a six-page letter.
From the looks of things, the segment on Watchdog was poorly researched, blatantly innaccurate and simply not true. Sounds like the kind of thing I expect from the BBC these days.
Contest:
9:30 PM on 09.17.2009
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Bad!
Bad Watchdog!
That is not how we do the journalisms!
Looks like they didn't. -_-
Why would anyone do this? How would this benefit Watchdog in anyway? I'm confused. I understand political scare tactics but this is just dumb.
You used to be cool.
360's fail rate is HUUUUUGE.
Sony's balls about getting retailers to stock a system they won't make any money on are HUUUUUUUGE.
That is all.
It's really sad and screams of desperate fanboyism or some kind of money paid to them, wouldn't be surprised if by M$, to go through with this.
The blatant lies they state as fact are completely off the wall and are obviously meant to dissuade those who are less in touch with real facts about the product.
Watchdog, you are officially a bunch of retards who shouldn't be paid for anything other than dead-end, entry-level paying jobs for the duration of your stupidity.
Here's your guarantee that he's not - he's just anti-bullshit.
That thing's really starting to bug me.
Also, what are you feeding Handtoucan? He seems to be growing.
i actually got the feeling that watchdog wanted to fuck sony about a little after getting a six page letter about a show that hadn't even been made at the time, rather than just sending a rep to answer questions.
The BBC is cool in my book. Why? QI.
"It's really sad and screams of desperate fanboyism or some kind of money paid to them, wouldn't be surprised if by M$, to go through with this."
You should have noticed in the vid that one of their "experts" works freelance on a Microsoft Xbox 360 blog... c'mon, that one was obvious.
0$ is hard to beat.
On the other hand, you have Sony, where for every 1 article claiming of some ridiculously high failure rate, you have 5 that say otherwise. Within industry standards according to Sony (although, not entirely sure about that cause they're really tight-assed with their numbers). The 3-year warranty though, from MS...is an anomoly for electronics...seriously. Go look. The standard is a year. Hell, I've seen 30-90 days on some.
And the show...wtf? Lots of ps3s have failed...some number ....can't say how many...here's our, oh sorry no study or stats...and there's some gas of some sort somewhere doing somethign or other.......
a bunch of twats
You know what other numbers say alot. 54% is over 5 times higher than 10%.
Those are the reported failure rates of the 360 and PS3.
http://gamer.blorge.com/2009/08/18/xbox-360-failure-rate-over-50-percent-ps3-wii-more-reliable/
In your case, the 360's return policy was better for you. But for the 15 million MORE people that have experienced 360 failure over PS3 failure, it's probably a different story.
(And these numbers are STILL only educated guesses because MANY 360 users have experienced multiple system failures.)
I agree that for those who have had several 360 failures, maybe they'd have been ok with paying a bit more to have the reliability and all the features the PS3 have in the box like wi-fi.
My PS3 hasn't broken yet and I'm thankful for that. It's a hw backwards compatible 60gb model and you can bet your ass I'm scared it breaks. I don't even know if it'll be possible to repair it if that day ever comes. It's irreplaceable.
The sad reality is, this isn't the 80s anymore. Shit breaks. A lot. And fast.
"Oh, sorry for the misunderstanding."
"It's OK, big buildings look the same. It happens all the time."
Expect things to go downhill even further as they try to survive against Sky and Virgin media.
Good to see their report fail.
I love how people expect the BBC to maintain quality AND pay less/no license fee AND are in favour of letting some of the license fee get top-sliced and portioned out to other channels.
Your response pretty much says it all. The license fee is a contentious issue, and one that gets debated every which way, without any real avail. It's almost a yearly cycle now, one major news outlet will run a feature or an editorial about the fee, then the whole nation will talk about it.
Personally, I don't mind paying the fee, I can more than readily afford it, and do see it as a minor nuisance (the more money you have, the better, I'm sure you'd agree) however I do find it disconcerting that the BBC is slowly trying to emulate the sensationalist nature of say, Granada or Sky News. BBC is still very good at what it does, and I can't really level any negativity towards it, but reports like these and other attention grabbing acts sets a ungodly precedence.
The fiasco with the tempering with the footage of the queen to show her more angry than she was comes to mind, and that was (I think) a year ago.
If introducing more commercial funding allows standards of quality to remain and the BBC to not only survive, but improve, I'm all for it, if the BBC needs the license fee, I'm all for it. But there is a reason why the BBC is revered around the world, and, to an extent, respected significantly.
That's because of the quality of programming it produces or broadcasts.
I do expect the BBC to maintain quality, but I am not foolish enough to call the existence of the fee into question, merely I stated people are seeing less and less of a reason to why it exists.
'in favour of letting some of the license fee get top-sliced and portioned out to other channels.'
That is a unfortunate idea, the other channels get enough commercial money, they don't need anymore, it's not the BBC's fault they can't keep a hold on their spending .
Or it could have something to do with the return of Ann Robinson. Bring back sexy Julia Bradbury ;_;
It's no big secret I'm an employee of the BBC (though not one who is responsible for any programme content) so I have to be careful going too deeply into the issues, obviously (all opinions are my own, etc, whatever) and so I'll just say this story -does- seem bizarre at best.
But I see enough to be certain that the BBC is very much concerned with quality and that these license fee issues do present very real problems - the fact that the last settlement raised the fee below the level of inflation meant not insignificant job cuts in TV production - that was pretty well reported at the time. The other problem is that the BBC is a huge corporation which outputs a massive amount of stuff. There are the TV channels, radio, then one of the most visited websites in the world, and a lot more besides, and it's just simplistic to say that any one failure is a symptom of some big systemic failure, however tempting that must be.
Again, this is just me talking, and I am the tiniest of cogs, (my job is to help make sure all the copyrights are cleared/paid for in some programmes, when they get sold elsewhere) and couldn't even pretend to have the whole story - but I am immediately suspicious of stories which say 'the BBC is THIS, because of THAT' because usually it's a big more complex than that.
1) I'm pretty sure watchdog had stories on the 360 a long time ago - don't quote me, but I seem to remember it happening way back when the story was newer.
2) Why would they want to be biased against Sony? Currently 10% of all iPlayer usage is through the PS3, or so I heard.
3) Just because one product has a bigger problem doesn't mean that the PS3 has no problems at all - this isn't the first time I've heard stories about PS3 failures. While it may have been blown out of proportion in this case, there IS some level of hardware failure in the PS3 and someone decided (rightly or wrongly) that it was significant enough to investigate. Whether the 360 is worse or not is kind of beside the point.