NOW TV

Interlinked operations, can't have the one without the other.

Progress report, seems NOW TV Ireland on Twitter indicating imminent 'this month' launch of the BT/Premier pass in the Republic.

Yep - it looks like that was an inccorect listing. That match was covered on Premier Sports over the weekend. BT Sport & Premier Sports will be on their own Sports Extra Pass. We hope to have the Pass launched this month but no confirmed launch date at this time.

— NOW TV Ireland (@NOWTVIreland) October 7, 2019

As an aside practically every entry on that Irish Times screenshot bar the last is incorrect in some way; the first two Pro14 games were on eir Sport rather than Premier Sports (blocked in ROI), Liverpool v Leicester was on Premier Sports (ROI only), and Zebre v Dragons was substituted with alternative programming on the ROI version of FreeSports.

Launched now in ROI, Sports Extra pass at €10 per day, €15 per week,€34 per month (discounted to €17 for first three months at present)

https://www.nowtv.com/ie/watch-sports-extra

No idea why Sky decided to promote the European Challenge Cup over the Heineken Champions Cup in their little tournament logos bit at the bottom of the page, but anyway.

It appears there may have been a good reason why this launched in ROI yesterday...

An interesting move in the Irish TV landscape today has seen eir scrap it’s existing set top box and move over to an app running on an Apple TV.

What’s this got to to do with either Now TV or BT Sport, I hear you cry? Well eir will no longer be offering any Sky-owned or premium tier channels on their service and instead are directing customers to take up a Now TV pass via the Apple TV app. This comes just two months after eir had done a wholesale deal with Sky to offer BT Sport and Premier Sports on its “old” TV service (and indeed anyone who has already signed up to the “old” service can still subscribe to BT/Premier that way).

Game of Thrones reportedly returns to the Entertainment Box Sets at the very end of this month, considering that the appearance of this in 720/25fps Stereo caused apoplexy in the Now forums, this would seem to be a good time to launch the 1080/50fps/5.1 service. We can but hope.

AT LONG LAST HD HAS GONE LIVE on Supported Devices.

NOW TV Smart Stick
Any NOW TV Box except the white box
Roku Express or Roku Streaming Stick
A supported Samsung TV
PS4
LG Web OS TV (50fps not currently available).

Also NOWTV content from ALL Genres is available to pass holders via the NOWTV App on BT YouView (UHD box at least).

Gold, Comedy Central and SyFy live streams are still SD. I'm not sure if my 4K box needs a software update as I really haven't noticed much difference if any.

Now TV have published a help guide to the boost. It appears only two Sky Sports channels are 1080/50. Sky Sports Main Event and Sky Sports Premier League. You also get three simultaneous connections,

Fox is staying at 720p and Gold in SD. As I speak, SyFy is still in SD, although that is going FHD.

https://help.nowtv.com/article/what-is-now-tv-boost

Presumably most of the content on the channels that show drama is 25p (or 23.976p sped up to 25p) - so those remaining 25p makes sense. Sky News would benefit from 50p, as would any channels carrying entertainment shows shot 50Hz interlaced.

Gold would be nice in 50p when it is showing stuff shot interlaced in studio - such as sit coms.