I decided to upgrade my digital decoder to one with s-video out.   Made the call to the call centre and was told initially I could not do that since there was nothing wrong with my current decoder. But she put me through to L2 support. L2 sounded like a tech who took my details and scheduled a callout for the next day!

As usual they specified a time as being in a 4 hour interval and for me that was noon to 4pm. In fact they didn't come till 5pm because of the terrible weather in Wellington yesterday, some jobs had gone over time.  The tech duly arrived and checked my signal levels. Then after a bit of discussion of whether or not they could even do the box swapover because I did not have a modem connected, the tech decided she could. Phoned the office who validated the new box, she then reconnected everything (I have both AV outputs connected - one set to the TV, the other to my PVR) and all was done.

No chance to check if the s-video is any better yet but will try tonight. Surprised though to find that while the box has two sets of AV outputs (composite video and LR audio) there is only one s-video connector. So will have to decided if I want to see better TV or record better TV :-(