New Sky packages

I suppose the rise of super fast internet makes the likes of NowTV, Amazon and Netflix far more plausible that it ever could have been in the past. Previously the easiest way to get extra TV channels was to stick a dish on the side of the house and while cable did exist (though whether doing that was was cheaper than Sky I can't be sure) it was easier, especially if the cable company hadn't dug the pavement up already, just to have a dish installed.

It could be argued Sky's traditional model of a few hundred channels and charge extra for the "premium" movie and sports channels on top may not last long term. After all it's £40 a month at least for Sky with Cinema, whereas on NowTV its a tenner a month and you can take it on its own. Sky Sports works out to £49.50 with Sky (original and sports), or about £35 a month on its own on NowTV plus you don't have to have a dish either. It is known that Sky want to launch a "satellite TV down the internet" option next year similar to NowTV so they're obviously trying to aim at the people who can't have a dish.

I guess the main difference will have to be picture quality. NowTV is unicast streamed at pretty low bitrates. It's 'just good enough' for smaller screens (if you don't care about the halved image rate for sport and entertainment content). You pay less, because you get an inferior product. It's fine for watching on a tablet or phone, and OK for a 24" TV I guess (if you can put up with the 25p-ness of it). Wouldn't want to watch it on a 55" UHD set...

I suspect Sky's non-dish variant of Sky Q or similar will be much more similar to BT's TV delivery system. In other words high quality, close to identical experience to that of the HD and UHD broadcast streams (i.e. proper 2160/50p or 1080/50i - possibly 720/50p - for their mainstream channels), with 5.1 Dolby or Dolby Atmos audio. Not the bitrate starved, over compressed, stereo only stuff you get at 25p on NowTV.

I've found NOWTV more than adequate on my living room and man cave TVs through Samsung Smart TV and Roku.

I thought NowTV used adaptive bitrates? I know its not HD and it probably never will be but I find its picture quality, to my eyes, is as good as what I can see on an SD channel on Sky+. But then reviews of my car say it has a crap radio system sound-wise and I can't tell the difference between this quality and the quality I had from the radio in the car I had before this one - I'm probably not the best person to ask about "can you tell the difference between this and that"

Yep - I guess some people are more aware of or sensitive to picture quality than others.

Some people like Blu-rays, some are happy with DVDs. If people are happy, then they are happy.

Some people switch Motion Flow / Natural Motion off, turn off all the contrast enhancement, reality creation, noise reduction etc. functionality and reduce the sharpness on their TV to zero. Other people want a more processed look to their viewing, and that's fine too.

Yep - most unicast streaming systems (including iPlayer - which is one of the few streaming platforms that supports 50Hz as well as 25Hz content). That means that they can drop to a lower bitrate stream if the connectivity isn't capable of sustaining their higher bit rate streams. Problem is that NowTV's highest bitrate streams are still pretty dismal.



Yep - AIUI quite a lot of it technically is HD but the quality isn't fantastic. It's not terrible on stuff that isn't took taxing, but on complex stuff it isn't great in my experience, and the lack of 50Hz native support (it only supports 25p) means sport is a real compromise.

The NowTV stuff is probably better than a lot of SD channels (apart from the 50Hz issue) - but when you compare it to Sky HD stuff it does suffer. It's cheaper though - and for many people a very good solution.



If you like it, you like it. That's the important thing at the end of the day.

But we can agree that stretching 4:3 images to fill a 16:9 screen or cropping 4:3 to 16:9 is artistic vandalism, right?

I agree that stretching 4:3 to 16:9 (where things are distorted to the wrong shape) is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Cropping 4:3 to 16:9 is more complex. Done properly I can see an argument for doing it - particularly if part of a sequence of otherwise 16:9 native content and if the source sustains the crop in quality terms, and it can be done without massively compromising the original content. Cropping an entire 4:3 show to 16:9 with no thought to the composition? Not a fan of that...

Agree with you on both counts - the number of 4:3 programmes made on film being remastered for HD and then cropped to 16:9 is terrible and has put me off buying them - ‘Thunderbirds’ and ‘The Snowman’ to name two. ‘The World At War’ received similar treatment, those in charge of the remastering saying that some TV stations would only buy the remastered / HD version of it was 16:9. Fine, but at least release the DVD and Blu-Ray in 4:3- those keen enough to buy that would likely be happy with the original format. Even if the crop has been done with care it - on the whole - still has a very negative effect on the composition.

Those "HD" versions of The Simpsons that Sky One have been showing for the past couple of years are awful. Both because of the cropping, and the "processing" they've used to make it HD (they've clearly just run it through some sort of computer programme rather than remastering the film).

That World at War thing was stupid, I seem to remember they made a claim that "no channel wants to show 4:3 HD content"- which is a load of bull. I can think of plenty of channels in the UK alone that show 4:3 HD remasters of old TV shows and films (the ITV channels for a start have been doing it for years- ITV4 are showing a 4:3 HD episode of Quincy as I type this!). Thankfully Network stepped in and released a 4:3 blu-ray of that one (and actually made the fact it was in uncropped 4:3 a selling point).

I'd not watched The Simpsons on Sky One for a couple of years, so when I saw this "enhancement" last week, I had to check it wasn't the TV adding some processing inadvertently. It looks bloody terrible!