Tag Archive for 'BskyB'

Sky

Published on 26 November, 2009. 4 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

Sky Logo

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.

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11 Features That Sky+HD Should Have

Published on 6 March, 2009. 6 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

Sky HD, for those who don’t know, is the UK’s largest subscription TV provider. Similar to, say, Dish Network in the US, it provides HD and SD satellite TV for a monthly fee, and has all the usual channels you’d expect, such as entertainment, news, sports, kids, music, and so on. Anyway, Sky themselves offer three set top boxes:

Sky Digibox: Provides basic viewing-only access to Sky.
Sky+: Provides viewing of Sky channels, but adds an internal HDD so you can record and timeshift programs, and has two tuners so you can record one show while watching another…or record two shows and watch a previously recorded show.
Sky+HD: Same thing as Sky+, but with an HD decoder too.

All three boxes share the same EPG (Eletronic Program Guide) software, which, while it’s a decent and easy to use design, it’s showing it’s age now, is severely in need of a makeover. However, Sky have announced a makeover of the EPG for the HD box only, which is great news…when it’s out. It’s almost a year since they announced it, so hopefully it’ll be out soon.

Anyway, enough of that. This post is about the features that I wish the Sky+HD box had. So, on with the list.

  • eSATA HDD: The box has an eSATA jack on the back, but at the moment, you can’t use it for anything. Why not? The box has a stupidly small 320GB HDD (of which 160GB is reserved for Sky’s Anytime service), so why not open that up like the US services allow, and let me plug in my own 2TB drive? The current box, if you full it with HD movies, lets you have about two pages of programs, and then the HDD is full! In fact, this is perfect – put a 320GB minimum restriction on external drives, and then keep the internal HDD for Anytime, and use the eSATA drive for recordings!
  • USB Port: Again, this isn’t used for anything so why not let people use it for HDDs too? Or, just leave it unused, since eSATA is far better for HDDs. ;)
  • New EPG: It’s already been done by Sky, so WHEN are we getting it? (According to Twitter, it seems to be out on Tuesday the 10th of March, actually. Fingers crossed!)
  • HD Swap: It’s a descriptive name for it…and I think it’s would be a useful feature. Basically, the Sky box should be able to detect when you’re watching something in SD (such as Nature’s Great Events) on, say, BBC1, and see that it’s being broadcast at the same time on BBC HD. It should then pop up a suggestion saying “This program is in HD! Switch to the HD version?”, and you can choose if you want to switch or not. This could be made even better by having two more options in the settings – first of all, a setting to automaticially switch over to the HD version without asking you, and secondly, the option to map the HD channel to the SD channel number (quick example: set the box to switch to 4HD whenever you type in “104″, since 4HD’s quality is much better then the non-HD 4…even on SD channels.
  • Commerical break skipping: Windows Media Centre already this this feature. It would have to be mapped to an existing button on the remote (I considered double-tapping “Play”), but it would mean you could skip forward a specific time (instead of fast-forwarding) so as to bypass the ad breaks. Again, this could be an option that you can set in the settings, allowing you to change how far forward it goes, say, 30, 60, 90, 120, 180, or 240 seconds. I suspect this would cause quite an uproar from the broadcasters though, so it’s probably unlikely this would ever happen. :(
  • Shared DVRs: The ethernet port on the back of the Sky+HD box is unused, so, this would be a great feature for it. As long as all the Sky+HD boxes are on the same gigabit ethernet network, allow them to share their programs with each other. I’m not sure how well this would work with HD programs, or even SD programs (though you could perhaps buffer them, like YouTube does), but if it works well, why not allow the Sky+HD boxes to share their content? For example, if I record the cricket downstairs, on our main TV, but my parents then watch something else on that TV, I should be able to watch the football, stored on the TV downstairs, from my TV upstairs. I believe you can do this already with AT&T Uverse in America.
  • Pizza ordering: TiVo can order Dominos pizza, so why can’t we? :P
  • On-demand internet TV: This may be a little harder to implement, but the technology itself is there (the H264 decoder(s)) – allow the Sky+HD box to use the ethernet connection to connect to the internet and download TV shows such as Revision 3′s Tekzilla. This would, of course, be trickey to do due to the codecs needed, but I’m sure if Sky crammed ffdshow or similar into the box it would work for most video podcasts/internet shows. In terms of adding shows, this could be done via the Sky website, or something similar.
  • While we’re on the topic of internet TV…YouTube? I’m sure it can’t be that hard. Other devices can do it, so why can’t Sky?
  • Remote Record v2 (which the Sky+ box could do with as well): The current method of remotely recording programs is rubbish, if you ask me. You can either do it using Sky’s flash-only website (which won’t work on the iPhone, because, well, it’s Flash), by text (which I’ve never bothered to remember how/what to do and where to send it to), or via their Java app, which, annoyingly, works on only a few handsets. Also, setting it up is a nightmare, and you have to record things at least 30 mins before they start. The NEW remote record, however, should have both the website, using both Flash (for PCs) and non-Flash pages (for stuff like the iPhone), text, a Java app that works on all phones, an iPhone app, and finally, setup an official API for it so other people can code apps and so on for various devices. Setup should be made easier – you should simply have to enter your viewing card number on Sky’s website, then enter a code on the box itself if necessary, and that’s it. Simple. Oh, and finally, I’d like to be able to choose which box to send it to if you have two HD boxes.
  • CSS: What is CSS, you ask? Cascading Style Sheets. Oh yes. I think it would be amazing if you could go onto Sky’s website, input your own CSS (or user-submitted CSS), and be able to customize the colours of the EPG yourself. Again, this would send itself to your box using the ethernet jack, over the internets. Wouldn’t that be awesome? :D

So, those are the features that I wish Sky+HD had. Most of them should be easy to implement, and several of them are already available in the US and on other platforms. If Sky added these features (oh, and Sky News HD too please! :D ), Sky+HD really would become the best HD service available outside the USA. :)

Opinions?