Sky Q

Wow, amazing. Imagine watching a program in the sitting room and then pausing it to goto the kitchen for some grub and be able to continue watching in the kitchen.
Ground breaking stuff...............
.................................Oh hang on, Ive been doing that with years!!!
Seems Im pretty advanced then

Looks like Sky are re packaging stuff for a premium price thats already available. I recently cancelled Sky and bought a new combi box with dual satellite and dual terrestrial tuners. I can record EVERY saorview and a couple of satellite channels all at the same time. I think it can max about 12 recordings at the same time.
You dont need Sky to do this stuff! Lots of great free tv available. We dont miss the Sky channels at all. It was a great move for us.

3D failed for Sky so I guess its time for them to push another overpriced service thats not needed.

Sorry cant help myself, this is taken from a sky website:
"The system is based on the notion of 'fluid viewing', so that customers can watch programmes across a number of screens - for example, pausing a show in one room, then watching it in another."

Amazing....(Has nobody been using co-ax and magic eyes or remote control extenders all this time?)

ThisRegard wrote: »

Fine, but could be better with 1080p. My Netflix stream has a noticeably better picture than a lot of the HD channels on Sky.




Nobody know what it's going to cost, or what the subs will be. People are getting their knickers in a twist over nothing at the moment.

Sky calling the product "premium" is surely preparing the market for a costly product ?

Maybe some are missing the point. Of course you can currently pause your Sky Box and resume watching in the kitchen via magic eye, but whoever is back in the living room can't watch anything else on the Sky box.

This will allow you to resume your own recording on a mini box or tablet and free up the main Sky box again. You will even be able to download onto your tablet and take it with you. Great for those in rural Ireland who have ****e mobile broadband and can't rely on it for streaming. If you don't want to download it you can use Sky Go to stream on demand.

Nobody is forcing you to pay Sky for this or anything else. You can keep your current Sky receiver if you want, or junk the whole lot.

Yes, other boxes like Horizon do a lot of this stuff already but look at the moaning on here alone about those boxes and the crap user experience.

Sky will do it when they are ready and get it right, whether you want to pay their prices is another story.

Sky 3D is gimmicky, a waste of time and maybe a failure but that's no reason to say I'm glad I ditched Sky now, look at this crap 2 years too late.

What does that mean for the average joe? :P

bk wrote: »

Actually I wasn't really talking about this from the whole techy, Kodi, free perspective.

Having played with a FireTV, Netflix, etc. now, I'm certain this is the future of TV.

But what I'm talking about is Sky doing their own FireTV type stick. Imagine a Sky Go Stick that you plug into the HDMI port, which gives you exactly the same interface and EPG you see on the Sky Q box and all the same channels as the Sky Q box. The only difference being the channels are streamed to you over IPTV, rather then satellite.

Now imagine you press record or series link. It records the show for you just as it does today. But instead of storing it locally, it instead stores it in the "cloud" and when you press play it streams it from the cloud.

Using your tablet? no problem, it can stream all the same TV channels and access all your recordings in the cloud.

All of this from the customers perspective would work in exactly the same way as if they had a Sky Q box.

So what would the advantage be? Well there would be no need for a big €500 box with 2TB of storage space and 12 tuners! Instead the stick would cost just €25 and give you pretty much all the same ability. You also gain access to your recordings while out and about on your tablet. With Sky Q you have to sync your recordings to the tablet before leaving your home.

To be honest it is very inefficient placing what is basically a very powerful, expensive media center PC in every persons home, it is much more efficient to push all the hardware into the cloud.

The advantage of the cloud is you need for less hardware as it is shared. So with the cloud, when you press record, it will make a copy of the file on the cloud server. But in reality you probably aren't the only person recording the same show, likely thousands of other people are too. So on the cloud they don't make 1000 of files, instead they make just one (with some backups obviously) and link the other 1000 recordings to this one, this saving massive amounts of space (and thus costs).

With the Sky Q setup, they are basically pushing the cost of equipment onto the customer in a very inefficient way.

BTW It seems that UPC/Virgin are already doing exactly what I describe above, a system where everything is in the cloud, in some of their Eastern European markets. I think it will only be a matter of time before it makes it's way here.

I reckon that the main difference between the concept of the Sky Q system and that from different cable operators regarding cloud storage is about control over delivery.

The likes of UPC or Virgin would be able to control their own networking from the data centre to the customer, while the likes of Eir or BT/TalkTalk in the UK bundle their IPTV services in with their broadband & phone services where again they can control a lot of aspects of delivering from data centre to customer. However Sky doesn't have the same luxury.

It could do a similar IPTV & cloud delivery system to that of BT & TalkTalk with their own LLU network in the UK at least if all of it was contained solely within this. But this poses more problems when delivery is through more than one platform with both DVB-S & broadband delivery. Sky can maintain nearly all control over delivery via satellite through SES, but the internet delivery is much more problematic as their customers will all have different service speeds, levels and contention that is impossible for Sky to have any major control over for all their customers - particularly those that don't have "superfast" broadband speeds and especially those relying on 3G/4G mobile connections or satellite broadband.

Also with having the customer not being tied to the service providers' internet ecosystem like UPC, Eir or BT do, Sky don't have the ability to automatically zero-rate customers using cloud storage - whilst their current services involving box sets, BBC iPlayer etc. are IP delivered as is Now TV, users are told to be aware of costs against any limits they may have with their ISP therefore recording on to the receiver's own storage means the customer is not charged for anything beyond their subscription for timeshifting. Using a cloud system whereby the customer can't save to their own recording device but relies on an internet connection will almost always see such streaming use significantly increase. So I'm not really surprised that Sky haven't gone for such an approach as the platform is not a "wired" system the way DVB-C & IPTV services from Eir & BT are; too much out of their hands to make service level guarantees.

On the whole, it looks like a decent bit of kit even if it isn't exactly groundbreaking in terms of technology on an international scale - but Sky are pretty good at both marketing and delivering slick user interfaces. Someone mentioned Apple - well I remember back in 2007 getting a Symbian S60v3 smart phone that was pretty good for its time - then the 1st gen iPhone was announced and despite lacking a fair bit in terms of hardware and to a lesser extent in its firmware (inability to send an SMS to multiple recipients and crippled bluetooth capabilities as examples) compared to the likes of Nokia's then flagship N95, the fact that it had an extremely usable touch-screen interface that hadn't been seen much on popular phones up until then along with a slick UI and the fact that it was "APPLE!!!!" meant it sold lots and became a disruptive game changer for the mobile phone market. Right now if you have an Enigma2 receiver you could do quite a bit of what the Sky Q silver receiver promises, but getting it to be user-friendly can be a challenge. If Sky get it right on their plan for multimedia integration with Sky Q, I'd say it's more likely than not Sky Q will be a success even with a premium attached to it - the same way iPhones have premiums.

More Music wrote: »

Absolutely nothing, and you won't be doing anything illegal or wrong by a owning a Sky Q box.

Powerline technology has been around for years and anybody can go into a shop and buy a Powerline/home plug adaptor for their home. Sky haven't produced anything illegal.

Microwave ovens, phone chargers, video senders, baby monitors and magic eyes etc. all produce RF signals of some sort.

Do you not think this hasn't been thought about and approved?

The bee in the bonnet, rightly or wrongly, is over potential widespread interference caused by at least some PLT devices that are claimed to meet emission limits, but don't really. BT were told to recall a bunch of PLT adaptors they gave to customers several years ago over major interference they generated, sometimes up to 400 metres away. The perception in the UK regarding these is that Ofcom don't really seem to give much of a damn unfortunately unless significant disruption to xDSL services are happening - if your neighbours' PLT is rendering reception of a MW or LW station you like to listen to impossible, then tough.

However that might start to change with the introduction of PLTs using even higher frequencies if they start to interfere with people's FM & DAB reception.

My limited knowledge on this appears to be that the general UK electrical system of having a "ring mains" appears to make PLT interference much more likely & widespread than those using a "star" distribution of power points like most of the Irish Republic does.

And to be fair, the RF interference caused by some electrical and electronic devices these days is pretty bad, cheap Chinese stuff like mobile phone/tablet chargers being among the worst with fake "CE" stickers on them that feed their interference back into the mains system. Sadly it seems that the authorities responsible in dealing with RF interference just don't care much any more unless there's a vested interest somewhere.