Vtuner not working

[Rbell2010]

Hi

I have not been able to access vtuner since Friday 5th September, I reported it to sony yesterday and the reply was "Unfortunately, our systems are currently down for maintenance and will be up and running within 24 hours, Please feel free to contact us again at that time.". 

Has anyone else not been able to access vtuner for 4days, it seems that being reliant on just one internet radio supplier may be like putting all of your eggs in one basket.

Having not had the internet radio service for 4 days I feel this is unacceptable, does anyone feel the same?

[alexcurt]

Same problem. Vtuner has been offline with message Cannot Play for almost a week. I have a feeling this is a money thing. I guess some genius at Sony "forgot" to pay the license fee to Vtuner.Or some even greater genius said "mmmhh thats expensive !! We need to cut cost!!" Lets not Pay Vtuner!!!

Well Sony here is the deal. People won't buy your stuff any more if you make it unuseable. That means the revenue might go down even more than the cost.

[Rbell2010]

Thanks to everyone who has the vtuner problem for posting on this topic.

i received a reply back from support yesterday which said" We are sorry to read that you have an issue with your device, and I can confirm that you need to contact the Sony Support Team on 0207 365 2810 or send an e-mail by filling the form in the link below, to get further assistance with this matter.

http://services.sony.co.uk/support/en/contacts/email

I am sorry I cannot be of greater assistance on this occasion."

this is has now brought me back to where I started so I used the link above to let sony know I thought their treatment of there customers was very poor and they should make an announcement ASAP pointing them to this community blog.

i would expect this to be sorted by this weekend or I will certainly be looking at returning both my av amp and ns510 portable speaker and demanding a refund.

please keep on putting pressure on sony to fix this and put in safeguards for the future, 

[Tammie_M3ENF]

I've e-mailed them too, let's hope something is done soon. 

[BollyDave]

Small update.

I've also received the same reply to the query I raised with "SonyEntertainment.UK@eu.sony.com".

When I say the same reply, I mean exactly the same reply. It's clearly a template and from my perspective smacks of passing the buck with very little care for the customer being demonstrated.

I have however, raised yet another query via the suggested details, but right now my confidence in Sony is decreasing at a rapid rate of knots.

Whilst I would welcome a constructive response from someone, anyone that knows what is going on and offers a solution, I am not holding my breath.

The next thing I am considering is helping prospective buyers of this hardware avoid the same frustration. That's quite a simple thing to do, by providing customer reviews on every online retailer's webpages to put this issue out in the open.

I don't think that unreasonable as I am increasingly of the opinion that a product is now not being sold as advertised. Simple. It was annoying to find some expected features just don't work or don't exist on my receiver, but to have features actually taken away? That's just wrong in every sense,

I may also consider my options in taking the device back to the retailer and asking for an exchange. There's plenty more AV kit out there.

[Anonymous]

Good Afternoon All

The lastest information received today in regards to vTuner is that there is no simple solution.  I do not know the technical details on what is exactly wrong (and apparently nor does Sony), as well as there is no ETA of a fix (YET!!).  What I can tell you is that this is a world-wide issue and as such Sony Japan has taken control of the situation.

All I can suggest to everyone is to please continue to be patient (and I know alot of you have been) - I am confident of a fix - its just a matter of when.

Thank you all.

[BollyDave]

@Anonymous Thanks for the update. It's the first sign something may be happening. I have to say I am extremely disappointed, and to be honest, surprised at how poorly the issue is being handled by a corporation as big as Sony.

Whilst I realise that the service is effectively free to the customer (bar bandwidth usage) the reality is that many Sony kit owners selected specific kit with this feature in mind, and presumably there was a premium included in the overall price of the hardware to fund that indirectly.

Now I can understand that problems can arise, having considerable background in the delivery and management of IT infrastructure for a company with a global customer base. Stuff happens, that's life. What is not acceptable though is to leave the consumer/customer in the dark, as has happened here, and then to exacerbate the situation by having customers that do enquire, passed around the system, gaining no further insight into the situation, nor the timeline for expected problem resolution. 

One thing I learnt was that it's one thing to have a service outage, but it's completely another to combine that with what appears to be a policy of passing the buck as some of us have experienced. All that needs to be done is for Sony to use their own web pages to keep consumers appraised of the status of broken services, and I'm sure many of us would feel more reassured!

Incidentally, I've yet to receive a response to my query as raised to the vTuner folks directly 

[drdeej]

Tried getting in touch with @sonyuk on twitter. Cannot believe how casually they are treating this. I would attach the tweet but not sure how to. Sony make great, if not the best, electronics. Their customer support however is p*** poor. Thinking of taking this issue to the radio seriously now as Sony got caught with their pants down here. Whats happened to that so called Japanese honor? Right now it's worth diddly squat.

[Rbell2010]

Hi latest update,

just received a reply from Sony support;

Thank you for contacting Sony Entertainment Network.

Please accept my sincere apologies for the unintended inconvenience.
The Native App implementation of the vTuner service on Sony connected consumer electronic products are currently unavailable due to service provider related issues.
Our engineers are currently working on resolving this as soon as possible .

For any further inquiries related to Sony Entertainment Network, please feel free to reply to this e-mail or contact us on 0844 369 0108 (Mon-Fri 8:00am-6:00pm).

Yours faithfully
Mariam El Sayed

SONY SUPPORT TEAM

Why couldn't sony have made an announcement when the vtuner stopped working?

[drdeej]

So, in layman's terms Vtuner has stopped Sony connecting to its service like one of the earlier posters said. I have given up using additional devices to stream to my SANS device and have hard wired a internet radio to it thus defeating the original purpose of the speaker. Stay tooned folks as I suspect Sony are going to have to (if we don't get Vtuner back) bring out completely new software for all our devices that will probably include TuneIn radio or something. I'm just speculating though. Still not happy it has taken this long and there has only been contact through forums.

[aja007]

This response is unacceptable!!!

We have been without access to internet stations for a week now therefore this makes our units not fit for purpose! I assume Sony will be offering refunds for these units?