New Sky packages

May I politely request that you change the record? I don't think there's anyone here who isn't aware of this, thanks to your regular posts on the matter.

Significantly?

I wouldn't be able to tell the difference from watching Game of Thrones on Sky HD or Now TV. Now TV PQ used to be terrible, but no longer. I get there are technical differences, but I can't tell the difference.

Greed.

Do you get these box sets on Now TV?

I mean is there any box sets that are missing on Now TV compared to the normal Sky package. I can't see any, I mean you get the latest stuff on Now TV and old stuff also.

As far as I can tell the box sets on Now TV are the same as on Sky.

It never used to be like that. For example, series 2 of The Tunnel was drip fed at Sky Altantic pace where as it was all on Sky Box Sets from the start.

This time round, The Tunnel series 3 is all on NOW TV.

I think Sky have realised they've painted themselves into a corner with their current model, as I can't recall a price rise for the packages for the whole of this calendar year (save for people on old legacy packages to bring them in line with everybody else) and this may be an attempt to try and make the service look like better value.

Of course your £22 a month doesn't just pay for the ability to receive channels, we all know here it isn't cheap to run a TV station and I dare say Sky and others probably also have to pay a fortune to the people who build, launch, maintain and keep the satellites in the right place in the sky 24/7/365. NowTV has the benefit I suppose of effectively using a large chunk of the infrastructure that's already in place so it was probably cheap to get going by butchering some Roku firmware in the process.

A while back someone on Digital Spy did some back of a fag packet calculations based on Sky’s annual report and worked out that off screen operational costs - the things you mentioned plus subscriber management etc - could be up to £20 per customer per month.

Highly improbable.



I believe it cost Sky, for example, 70p for the HBO content per customer per month. If it really costs £20 a month per customer, they are doing something wrong.

And this is one area I think Virgin has it better. Ok so our viewing habits lend towards the top-tier package anyway, but you can add on Sky Cinema OR sports to any of the basic packs - and HD if wanted. So you could take VM's equivalent of Freeview and have Sports plus HD if you wanted, and this would include red-button. I've no idea how this compares price-wise, but it does seem that Sky Premiums via Virgin seems to get a fractionally better deal than via Sky.

I always thought the box sets were slightly more constrained on NOW TV, particularly on how long box sets were available for. I think it's probably better now, but the Sky Boxsets package was the only way to get the whole catalogue to be available all of the time. I can imagine the cost versus benefit to the consumer ratio would mean that it makes sense to have as much available as possible on NOW TV anyway, considering how much it's grown. We'll never hear about the churn figures for the passes, but I expect as the product gets older they'll be focusing less on attracting those who don't want a dish and more on retaining customers.

I noticed that The West Wing has disappeared from Sky's On Demand section (as of July 2017) but is still shown on Sky Atlantic. There must be a separate deal between linear and On Demand rights for that one.

I was recently asked to do some research for a mate that was moving house as to what the best providers for broadband and TV were. I was really surprised at SkyQ being the only option and how incredibly expensive it is. Sky will find it hard to retain millennials and younger who have grown up with the brand in their family home and now seemingly can't afford it by themselves. All their reasonably priced stuff is under the NOW TV brand. SkyQ seems pitched at large family homes - they don't seem interested in renters or single people like they were 5 years ago (when I was a student, Sky were really trying to hoover up student broadband contracts and attaching TV to it).

I am a millennial, and I can afford Sky, but it doesn't really appeal to me. My parents got Sky in 97(ish), so I had Sky from the start (digital start). If we were in 1997, or even 2007, I would have Sky, because it would be value for money. But in 2017 it isn't, I can get Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Now TV, all for the same price as one over bloated Sky package.

In addition, forgetting about Netflix and co, Sky's content just isn't as good as it used to be. The things I used to get sky for were, UK Gold, which showed the classics, the documentary channels, for shows like seconds from disaster, Sci-Fi and Sky one for the Simpsons and Star Trek, Lost etc, and the movie channels, to watch classics and good movie premiers on Fridays or Saturday nights if I remember right.

These days, there are too many channels, the classics have been re-run so many times, i'm surprised the "tapes" have lasted, how many more times do we need to see Only Fools and Horses? the documentary channels show hardly any documentaries, what does ice road truckers have to do with history? and last time I had the misfortune of tuning in, they were advertising some sort of sex tv show to be show on History. Sky One had nothing at all, apart from Ross Kemp, that interests me. An Idiot abroad was the last thing they produced which I enjoyed. The movie channels show endless low budget trash, which I don't really want to be paying for. Why do we need so many movie channels?

So I really don't think Sky will ever inhabit my home again. I only have Now TV because I have left over series from my Sky days such as GoT and walking dead which I want to finish watching, then even that will go, because there isn't much on Now TV that interests me either. The only thing Sky have going for them, is Sky Atlantic (which is mostly HBO, which I suspect at some point will cut Sky out as the middle man but not yet) and the systems they allow customers to use Sky Q/Plus. But that isn't worth all that extra money. Even with 4K, its available elsewhere for cheaper, it isn't like when HD came out and Sky was the only place (?) you could get it.

It does not help when Channels like MGM HD and ITV Encore close down, MGM HD closed, we were told the movies would show up on Sky Movies, I don't think they ever did.

I understand not all of these things are under the control of Sky, but at the end of the day, I am just a customer, and I will subscribe to what I want. Sky are the big boys, they want to forget about the sports and focus on the rest for a while.