Freeview box £10 at tesco

[yenrod]

What other stuff is made by companies and branded out as 'others'... Do you know ?

Probably made in Turkey, that's where Vestel's factory still is I think. It's possible it was manufactured in Turkey (or elsewhere) and flown in to the UK (or elsewhere) and assembled as happens with their LCD tvs which are then badged as other companies.

I got a laugh when I saw the picture of the box as it's the same as the digihome box I bought my girlfriend 18 months ago for £27 which went down in price to about £23 before moving onto argos as a SEG at a similar price.

 

[marinyork]

What other stuff is made by companies and branded out as 'others'... Do you know ?

What other stuff is made by companies and branded out as 'others'... Do you know ?

Just about anything, but it depends where a product is in it's lifetime cycle. What I mean by that is when a product is newly released and the few years around it a product will be made by the boxed name itself - as they have spent much capital on R&D and margins are generous so there is little pressure to outsource and save money on parts. After several years of production big brand names outsource and the product may not be made by them at all but they want to keep their name out there while sales continue before the next product line comes out. It happened with VHS Video Recorders, it happened with CD drives, it's happening with DVD as companies like Sony are interested with higher matters of world domination. It happens with LCD tvs (as LCD was always the budget technology but consumers don't know that) where vestel makes a hell of a lot of these. It is claimed that a lot of this exists because of subsidies. I have no idea whether this is true or not but it's quite telling that there are other mass manufacturers like Beko that are also Turkish. Thomson are another company that used to make TVs and other electronics where labour is cheap and sell some as their own brand and some as other peoples.

Freeview boxes are well known to be manufactured in a very small number of factories but there are a couple of dozen brands I've seen. After digital launch on various platforms (not just Digital Terestrial Television) circa '98 (and later depending on platform) Digital Set Top Boxes cost £200+. Lots of people paid about that for ITV digital boxes, many of which are still working today. Many ITV digital boxes had RF modulators in, because of the squeeze on prices hardly any freeview box has an RF modulator in, it would be impossible to do manufacture it at the required price as people are very used to paying £25 for freeview boxes with prices going even lower if they are lucky. A similar thing has happened on freeview boxes with respect to the software and the remotes where budget software that has been knocking around for years is cloned and rolled out onto lots of boxes, many companies cannot be arsed to create better software and the testing and support it involves. Nearly every budget box is a vestel because a british company access devices used to make many of them but went into administration. I've had 3 vestel boxes and 2 access devices boxes. Bizarrely enough instead of being given the name of a british company my best box was badged as a budget japanese brand.

Even with HDTVs although not branding issues directly there's a lot of collaboration. Samsung and Sony did a lot of collaborative work on HDTVs but even though some of their top end products share quite a bit in common people swear blind that Samsung is awful and Sony is fantastic.