SKY Digital Interactive

Hi! My mom and dad bought SKY Digital yesterday, and we're waiting for the dish man to come. (I hope he looks like that one on the adverts - the cartoon one!) Anyway, does SKY Interactive work on SKY Digital, especially on SKY NEWS? If so, what does it do?

Thanks
Nick D

not much to be quite honest.... It does need to be improved on Sky News, but it comes to my knowledge that this is in the Pipeline...

You can watch the latest Headlines, Weather, Sport and Business on demand, nothing special....

Sometimes they put a replay of an interview, or a live feed from somewhere, but this is rare...

Sky Digital has some other Interactive services, i.e. Sky Movies Active, Big Brother Interactive and Sky Sports Extra...

Also, some channels have Digital Text, all the BBC channels do, Sky Channels do, and the Money channel has too...

Hope this helps

Cheers,
Kev

Yes, it does. You can select what you want, i.e. to read the news/sport etc., or to watch. You can select what you want to watch. There is continuous weather, news, sport, when you want it.

Personally, I just watch News 24!

Sky News Active is to be upgraded later this year.
Sky have bought extra bandwidth so that the service will be able to cope with Sky News Active having 8 screens - this was annouced in january.
The service will be more integrated with the website and follow a similar design.
There will be 8 screens available, with one possibly carrying Fox News - as this has not yet arrived in the form of a channel.
Final discussions are taking place now with Sky News managers as to which sub-niches will be allocated their own video stream.
So expect things such as UK News, Parliament Live, World News, Travel news .. things such as that.
The text service will also be enhanced, again with similar content from the internet.
Basically, they can slim down the internet operations, which BSkyB is so keen to do, by putting the same content out on the internet as they do on Sky News Active and vice versa.
this will increase the amount of content on Active and the speed at which the website is updated etc.

There are three main types of Sky Digital interactivity, although there is no clear distinction between what makes a service one or the other in the first two.

• Digital text - press the 'text' button on your remote for a mainly text based information service (though there are pictures as well) - services available are Sky Text, BBC Text and Money Channel Text
  
• 'Press red' - this is where you press the red button on your remote control to enter a service, such as Sky News Active, Sky Sport Active, Simply Shopping Interactive, QVC Interactive, etc.
  
• On the 'Interactive' menu - big interactive services such as Sky's 'Open....' and 'Playjam' (games) are accessed from an 'interactive' menu.
  

How on earth are they going to fit 8 screens on, allowing you to see what's going on, with links such as 'News, Sport etc.' on screen? Will it be a similar setup to Sky Movies Active or a two page thing, where you have 4 screens on one 'page' and four on another?

Cheers, Asa

I presume it will be like Movies Active.
But the whole thing is to be redesigned so they will already have planned it.

This might happen as part of the Sky News re-launch, so they could put the whole re-launch of till later in the year

The bloke who fixed mine up looked nothing like Bob Stevens (the cartoon guy) - I was really disappointed!

Mark Grindon

Hehehehe!
You don't need the keypad thing do you ( as we didn't want that) for interactive?

Nick

It will happen as part of the Sky News relaunch.

No, the Open.... keyboard is only needed if you want to do stuff like Email and banking through Open....
Otherwise you can do everything with the remote.
I think it's possible to send email with the remote - like a text message, but I don't know cos I've never tried!!

Mark Grindon