Sky. If you live outside the UK, you’ll know it’s that thing above you that’s usually either blue, grey, white, or black. Water falls out of it sometimes, and other times, planes do.
Except if you live inside the UK, you’ll know I’m talking about Sky. Yes, them. So, why am I talking about Sky? Well, simple. I want to complain. I like complaining. 
So at the moment, we have Sky’s “full” package. Which means we get all the “entertainment” packs – stuff like entertainment, documentaries, music, kids shows, news, etc. That’s the base price of £22.50 a month. Which, for the range of channels, isn’t too bad. It’s pretty much everything except movies and sports. Which we also get. Which brings the total up to £47.50 per month. Okay, so that’s expensive, but my dad loves the sports, and I watch a fair few movies, so we do use it. Then, of course, we have Sky’s HD box, with access to the HD channels…which is another £9.75 per month. So far, the total is £57.25 per month. Yeah, we’re starting to get expensive here.
Now, my parents almost always watch boring crap (I don’t have any interest in Strictly Come Dancing or Football / Rugby / etc, okay?), so I have my own Sky+HD box in my bedroom. Which means that we have a multiroom subscription (£9.75/month), and a second “HD” subscription (£9.75/month). So right now, we pay £76.75 per month. Which is US$127, CA$134, EU€85, or AU$139.
Oh, and I wouldn’t mind watching Sky News on my iPhone – Sky have an iPhone app that can do that (along with sports), which is £6 a month for non-customers…and actual customers. So you want to charge another £6 on top of that £76 we already pay? Um, no. If I buy a Slingbox, it’s more complicated, but it’ll cost the same over two years and it gives me access to ALL channels.
I would consider this to be on the high end of things – it’s a lot of money to pay for only TV (no broadband or phone), and yet…after all that, I hate the Sky+HD box. I hate their service in general. The content itself is great, but the rest of Sky….no.
Lets begin. The Sky+HD boxes have a 320GB HDD built in. You can replace it youself with any size up to 2TB, but you’ll void the warranty. Also, 160GB is reserved for Sky Anytime – their Video on Demand service. So the basic HDD you get with the box is pretty much 160GB for your stuff, and that’s it. If you upgrade to a 2TB HDD, well, good news! The 160GB out of that is only a tiny portion. Oh but wait, good news! The box has an eSATA port on the back which you can plug your own HDD into. But it won’t work. Yup. Sky haven’t done anything with this jack in the 3 years or so that it’s been available. Why not? I would LOVE to plug in a 5TB array of HDDs. You can keep your fancy NDS encryption, Sky, just let me add more space like some of the the US cable companies allow!
Moving on, the ethernet port. Ooooer. You could use this for VoD services, and more. Hell, it’d be great for a more reliable “remote record” system. Sky’s current system means that if I want to record something, I can send Sky a text and the box will start recording something based on that text. Except you need to do it 30 mins in advance and it only seems to work with one box. If they did it properly, and used the internet for it, I could control both boxes, and even better, within minutes.
Which brings me onto my next point. I’m not 100% sure, but I believe AT&T’s U-Verse service in the US has a much better system. A centralised “server” box somewhere in your house with plenty of HDD space, and “client” boxes in several rooms of your house that simply stream off the server box. Why don’t Sky do that? If they offered a system with a single box that had at least 2TB of HDD space, at least 6 satellite tuners, and up to, say, 5 client boxes which you plug into your TVs, I would be all over it. It’s a great idea. I can record the news from any box, and then watch it on any other box. Neat! But no, this is Sky we’re talking about, so that’ll never happen.
Finally – not because I’ve run out of things to complain about, but because I want to go and have something to eat – the software. Sky are in the process of rolling out a new software update to their HD boxes which looks a lot nicer than the current one. Our older Thomson box downstairs has it, but my Amstrad box in my bedroom doesn’t have it yet. The problem is, it’s slow and buggy. Since it arrived, the Thomson box downstairs that has it has crashed, lots, requiring a full unplug-replug-reboot to make it work again. The old software, on the other hand, is fast, but ugly and featureless. What I can’t understand is why Sky can’t do one of two things:
1) Scrap the whole system and hire Microsoft to design a sexy UI on a reliable box that has a huge HDD and runs quiet; or
2) Start offering dedicated PCIe-based tuners that are locked down to Sky’s spec, which allow you to use Windows Media Centre.
WMC might be a resource hug but damn, it’s sexy to use. And it works well. In the US, you can already do this with a CableCARD based system, but here? Nope. The only solution is to use Sky’s box with a HD capture card, but that still means you have the horrible Sky box and interface to deal with.
There are two things that might pave the way for the future though. Sky’s “Sky Player” is available on both the Xbox 360 and Windows Media Centre, and both of those are actually quite good. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that if Sky and Microsoft developed some kind of USB-based addon that works on both the 360 and a PC with Windows Media Centre, which had a 1TB HDD, two HD satellite tuners, and a Sky subscription card reader, and then used my Xbox 360 /PC as the Sky box, I’d swap, right now, simply because the 360 / PC has, and will always have, a superior interface.
TL;DR? To summarise: Sky charge too much, Sky box sucks, Sky should release a USB-based satellite tuner for the 360/PC and let me use one of those as my Sky box.
Doctor Jones by Aqua
Screw that, I’m sticking with my built in free view on my 22″
you forgot to mention Brazil, where the Sky service is very expensive. I don´t have the HD pack and I pay more almost U$100,00.
I didn’t mention it because I’m not aware of it. I do understand that other countries are most likely cheaper or more expensive then the UK, but you have to remember that I’m talking about British Sky Broadcasting here.
There’s also Sky Italia, Sky in Brazil, and whatever other services are out there (which doubtless charge a fortune too).
In relevance to the complaints, Sky’s new EPG as it is called for the HD box was tested thoroughly before launch. The system, after an update, needs to be reset to make it function at peak, like installing an app on your computer.
You can do this by performing a Sky+ Rebuild within the installer menu. Sky also add eSata/USB connectors for ‘future use’ it is the same reason they have an LAN connection so that one day it can be connected to the internet.
Yeah sky is expensive compared other packages but the selection is their to justify the cost. The reason for £10 extra for the Multiroom HD subscription is because their is 4 times as much data being passed through the satellite, Sky pays for every bit sent through the sat system and subsequently has to recoup the cost.
With regards to remote record, you can set it up to record to as many as 7 boxes, so you can hook up your Multiroom to this.
Why don’t sky make a pci card:
1. Because they have to put a telephone receiver and pickup in it (for interactive features)
2. They need to have the viewing card slot into it.
3. They need to have a special storage space, users cannot be guaranteed to have the minimum space required.
4. Why the hell would sky add another product to their package when 9/10 people watch television programmes on their TELEVISION.
ps, with regards to the ‘Microsoft’ and ’sexy’ comment, those two words can never be seen in a sentence together without the words ‘is not’ placed between them.