Sky Player

Sky have an "iPlayer like" service unimaginatively called Sky Player. I don't have a Sky subscription (I did until a tree grew too tall and blocked the signal) and due to moving home I will soon be giving up Homechoice/Tiscali TV/Talk Talk TV so I was hoping a Sky Player subscription would give me a way to access Sky content without a dish. I'm not interested in the Sports or Movie channels - all I want access to is the base channels. As I'm a desktop Linux user their desktop client is useless to me (why go with fairly open, almost universally installed technologies like flash when you can go with Silverlight?) but they have a relatively new XBox 360 app and I have a relatively new XBox 360 so I've decided to give it a try. Unfortunately, I can't say that I'm all that impressed with it.

Sky allow non Sky subscribers to access the base Sky Player package for £15 a month (though with a new XBox, you can take out a 3 month trial subscription for £10 - which is what I've gone for). For that £15 a month you don't get much - access to a small library of Video on Demand content and a handful of live channels. Not only is the VOD library far from extensive, it's most annoying feature is that it will happily show you all the content from Bravo that there is no way to get access to if you're a Sky Player only subscriber (Sky Player is available free to Sky subscribers, and if you have a package that includes Bravo then you can get Bravo's VOD content). Worse (and the reason why I won't be continuing to subscribe) is that not only is the number of live channels somewhat thin, Sky 1 is crippled - shows like the Simpsons get blocked. Why it's OK for Talk Talk to transmit the Simpsons on Sky 1 over IP while it's not OK for Sky to transmit the Simpsons on Sky 1 over IP is the sort of thing only a media lawyer could understand. Still, I don't have to understand Sky's reason - I just have to not give them my money.

I can see Sky Player being useful if you live in a Sky subscribing household and want to get limited Sky content in a room without having to install a second (or third) Sky box. I can see it being useful if you're a bored Sky subscriber sitting in a Starbucks with a laptop that's running Windows or Mac OS with time to kill (latte sippin' iPad fans are in the same boat as us Linux users - greetings comrades!). If you don't already have Sky then it's hard to see what's there to justify £15 a month. I guess if you want the sports channels, are unable to get them any way else and yet money is little object then maybe it's for you, but if all you want is "basic cable" over IP then Sky Player sadly isn't the way to go.

Sky Coming To Tiscali

According to Broadband TV News, the basic Sky channels are coming to Tiscali!!!!! Sky 1,2,3, Arts, Travel, News and Sports News.


About time.

I've Finally Got DTT

A few weeks back I posted about how Homechoice/Tiscali was my only choice for Broadband/TV service and that even analogue TV was gone, as the aerial had fallen off the roof. Last week the aerial was put back up and there was a little sign saying that we needed to retune our TVs. I wondered if that meant that we could now get DTT (though nothing was mentioned). I've borrowed my parent's Freeview box (they barely use it anyway as they get Sky) and low and behold I now get DTT. All of the multiplexes except for multiplex 2 come in at 100% signal strength. Sadly, while I get multiplex 2, the signal strength seems to be around 75%, so the picture and sound often break up on the ITV and Channel 4 channels. I'm not using the best cable in the world (and it's fairly long for an unamplified cable), so I might try playing around and seeing if I can get a better signal.

Still, now that I get DTT, it at least opens up the possibility of moving away from Homechoice/Tiscali, should the new Tiscali branded service not come up to scratch. However, a quick glance at my options, (TopUp TV Anytime, BT Vision and Simply's tvMax) has not shown much promise. Even worse, just as I get a small taste of Sky back (even if it's just Sky News and Sky 3) an article at DigitalSpy indicates that Sky want to replace those channels with a MPEG 4 based pay service that "will offer a range of content including sports, movies, entertainment and news". They'll probably get between 2 to 4 MPEG 4 channels for each MPEG 2 channel - so ultimatly it'll be between 6 and 12 channels, which is fairly limited compared to DSAT. As such, I doubt I would want to pay more than about 5 quid for an "entertainment and news pack", especially seeing as single "Mix" (which is a comparitively large group of similar channels) on Sky costs between £3.50 and £7.50 (as the bare minumum you can subscribe on Sky is 2 mixes for £15, and that goes up to 6 mixes for £21). I don't hold out much hope - "Sky By Wire" which is available on Homechoice offers half of the Sky Movies channels for more than what all the movie channels cost Sky Subscribers. Worse, Sky By Wire is just Movies and Sports - it's the entertainment and news channels that I want. Sky won't want to cannibalize their current subscriber base, but will want to keep competitor pay services at bay as much as possible - a half hearted attempt at a DTT pay platform will go some way to fulfilling both those goals.