Sky TV to go satellite dish-free in 2018

What stops them getting full service from a communal dish?

Not a great headline from the BBC there - Sky isn't going dish-free. It'll be available dish-free, as a fallback.

In my flat, we can only get one dish feed, so all the advantages of the multiple tuners are pointless.

Ah, well, that's down to the setup, not an inherent problem with communal dishes per se.

Same here, one feed. But I believe even if there were multiple feeds, upgrades to the equipment would be necessary (might be a capacity issue)

To do that though would involve replacing all the multiplexing and distribution kit, and rewiring every apartment in the building as there's only one link from the equipment closets to each apartment (and all the cables are run through floors / embedded in walls, so no easy method of pulling an extra line in).

Many communal setups that weren't installed by Sky will only be the Sky+ setup, which is the two feeds. Many older ones as stated will still only have a single feed as they predate Sky+.

Whether the setups that Sky manage/installed for Sky+ have all been "Sky Q'ed" for want of a better term with the replacement LNBs and what not for the tuners I don't know.

Could it be that one day in the future we could have multiple tuners on Sky without having to change the LNB on the dish every time a new tuner is added?

Sky wrote to us, they want to upgrade us to Sky Q but need our landlord's permission to carry out the upgrade - I was told by the letting agents that the landlord owns all of the satellite kit currently in the building (which is one feed to each of 47 flats).

I don't think Sky will propse streaming for dish-less Sky, that's what NowTV is for.

I suspect Sky without a dish will be like BT's TV provision. That is implemented by multicast from the exchange. This is a VERY different kettle of fish to streaming (which is what OTT services use)

With streaming, you are unicasting a stream to every subscriber watching over the public internet, and usually have seamless switching between different bitrate streams (either using MPEG-DASH or one of the other systems like HLS or HDS?).

With multicast you route live streams over a private, non-public internet, backbone to the exchange, and make them available via multicast over the final leg. This means a single stream serves all subscribers simultaneoulsy (so you don't have to scale servers to subscribers in the same way), and you aren't at the mercy of 'public internet' and contention and QoS can be managed very differently. The reason they don't do this for NowTV is that multicast over the public internet isn't really an option. This will almost certainly mean you'll need Sky broadband of course...

The quality of the stream is fixed and at a 'broadcast quality' - and is pretty identical to the streams that you will get from satellite. (So you'll need to be able to cope with 18Mbs peaks for a single HD channel, and far higher for UHD, if they go for that quality. That said they COULD go for H265 - as I bet the Sky Q boxes support it, though 1080i doesn't compress that well in H265...)

Of course if you only have 70Mbs or less of final-leg download capacity, if you start watching or locally recording two different 4K channels in different rooms, your internet connection will slow down...

It's just reminded me - I remember when the BBC were trialling multicast when they were using Real player years back, did anything ever come of this?

No - think there was a lack of ISP buy-in. It cost them money but didn't generate revenue...

Of course, if the ISP themselves are providing the multicast service for payment... Different situation.

One of Sky Q's USPs is the increased number of tuners to feed separate devices through your own internal WiFi within your home.

That requires up to 12 feeds (11 high quality, 1 SD for the PinP image) being processed by the STB.

If you've got a high level fibre connection able to handle that, then chances are you're within a metropolitan area which will probably have good DSat signal reception in the first place.

I can't see many people needing to opt for the IPTV solution.

Surely D-Sat reception is more likely to be impossible in some urban areas, than on a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere 10 miles from the exchange, so actually Sky's model makes sense ?