The announcement by the Sky+ team confirms that the Sky+ charge "will be removed for all Sky Digital customers subscribed to any Sky Digital package" at the start of July. Sky HD customers are not affected, as the £10 Sky+ fee is already "waived", and should a Sky+ owner cease subscribing to a Sky Digital package they will have to resume paying the £10 per month charge to continue to access the Sky+ functionality.
I've been with SKY since 2001, with Multiroom(Sky + downstairs, normal Sky upstairs) for about 2 years.
Do we 'lose' the £10 or not?
£10/month for multi-room is not relevant to this.
The Sky+ £10/month charge was dropped for Movies + Sports subscribers some time back, so if you have the premium channels you've already stopped paying it.
However if you have a more basic subscription, then you will be paying £10/month for Sky+ which will be dropped in July.
So it depends what you subscribe to currently as to whether you've already had the saving, or will be about to get it!
This is really only good news for people without Movies or Sport. However, commercially, it makes sense with the BBC FreeSat consortium proposing a PVR next year. It might well persuade lapsed Sky+ users (like me!) to put their box back into service. I bought a Freeview PVR instead a year ago as Sky+ put their subscription up and up over the time I was with them (I had Sky+ at launch). I had a pretty basic entertainment package but it still seemed to be costing me a hell of a lot of money every month - the £10 extra for Sky+ functionality was a very annoying component.
What is a pain (though isn't surprising) is that you still pay the £10 if you don't subscribe to a Sky package, so you cannot have a
"Freesat from Sky"
card on a Sky+ box without paying the tenner.
This may have been partially in response to the recent launch of the 'Freeview Playback' brand which manufacturers of DTT PVRs can use. Although common items, an awful lot of people still have no idea what they are and this brand may well raise awareness of them.
Given also that Virgin offer free VOD to all subscribers, Sky would seem decidedly backward if they were to continue to charge an extra premium for having a box that does anything other than receive live broadcasts.
In any case, the Sky+ subcription was always a dubious thing which I felt should have bene investigated by trading standards; they charged the extra £10 in the guise of a service. But it isn't a service, it's a facility built into the box which the customer has allready paid extra to have - and which has become their property. Selling someone a piece of equipment as having certain features, and then turning some of those features off if a monthly charge is not paid has surely got to be on very shakey legal grounds - it's like buying a TV with teletext but the teletext is disabled unless you pay the manufacturer a monthly charge.
GM
nodnirG kraM
Not really much difference between that and TiVo's monthly or lifetime subscription though.
With TiVo you are paying for a service -- an entirely separate EPG, along with highlighted programmes compiled by the company. You shouldn't begrudge TiVo its money any more than companies like Digiguide. With Sky+ however, as Chris says, the EPG is delivered to viewers without a Sky+ box as part of the subscription. Many Sky+ owners have been paying for this twice, which is clearly unfair. The EPG Sky+ uses offers absolutely nothing over the one standard Sky boxes use, because it is the same thing.
That said, for non-subscribers to pay the £10 has some justification, as this takes care of the administration of the account if nothing else.
On an unrelated note, it really, really anoys me that Sky continue to offer the criminally basic Sky+ technology after all this time. The Series Link technology is WOEFULLY inadequate. I'm sorry, but a system that "forgets" about series if they're off air for a couple of weeks is worse than useless. I STILL have my TiVo box, and can't let go of it, if only for this reason. It's going to be like having an arm cut off when TiVo finally wind down and I'm stuck with the inferior Sky technology.
My bf was looking into signing us up for Sky+ yesterday, and it appears that the £10 has *already* been scrapped for new subscribers. Just selecting 4 mixes and a Sky+ box on the Sky website gives a monthly subscription of £18, with the Sky+ sub showing as FREE.
GM
nodnirG kraM
Wholeheartedly agree that TiVo's software is vastly superior over that of Sky+. Something as basic as 60x fast forward would be nice.
I've been holding off cancelling my Sky Movies subscription, but that will definitely be going now that: a third of Sky Movies' daily output has been dropped, with no reduction in cost for me; and that I will get free Sky+ without it anyway. Bye bye Sky Movies.