Sky Anytime - what a crock

zagmund

I was just reading through the manual (no, I'm not an engineer, I was bored) for Sky+ which we got installed this week and came across Anytime TV.

This sounded like something good. It looked even better when I saw it had recorded the Simpsons Movie, Spider Man 3 and a few other things. It began to look like a crock when I tried to play them and got the stupid message from Sky that I need to upgrade my subscription to watch them. What on earth is the point of the stupid box recording this stuff if I can't watch it ?

Is this by design (in which case it's a stupid design) or is it a bug and the box should only record content I'm entitled to watch ? The manual doesn't give any options other than turn it on or off.

Thanks,

z

tony1kenobi

It's marketing.

Upgrade your subscription or stop complaining.

Tony

It can be turned off

bittihuduga

you can view programs if you have subscribed that channel
no subscription = no viewing = only names displayed :-)

zagmund

Tony - I had seen in the manual that I could turn it off alright, so I may end up doing that. I was hoping it would just record things that I could actually watch.

The way it is currently configured is similar to sweets in the check-out aisles in supermarkets - it looks like it is there to tempt/coerce people to buy stuff they don't want under pressure from kids by dangling it in front of them.

bittihuduga - at the moment the thing displays the program trailer and other details and you have to click into it to find out you can't watch it. This has not improved my already poor view of Skys marketing 'tactics', although I will admit that I did vountarily sign up for a years service, so I admit there is some value in their service.

z

Ozzie

what did you expect? you'd get to see prog's from channels you don't subscribe to?

MarkK

Ozzie wrote: »

what did you expect? you'd get to see prog's from channels you don't subscribe to?

I expect he presumed that Anytime would only record programmes that he could actually watch, which seems pretty reasonable to me.

Our man in Havana

It sends the same programmes to everyone. It is an ingenius marketing ploy.

itisyeah

zagmund wrote: »

I was just reading through the manual (no, I'm not an engineer, I was bored) for Sky+ which we got installed this week and came across Anytime TV.

This sounded like something good. It looked even better when I saw it had recorded the Simpsons Movie, Spider Man 3 and a few other things. It began to look like a crock when I tried to play them and got the stupid message from Sky that I need to upgrade my subscription to watch them. What on earth is the point of the stupid box recording this stuff if I can't watch it ?

Is this by design (in which case it's a stupid design) or is it a bug and the box should only record content I'm entitled to watch ? The manual doesn't give any options other than turn it on or off.

Thanks,

z

totally agree with you, i have no idea why stuff from the movie channels are recorded when I dont even subscribe to movies.

marketing i guess, but theres no way id subscribe to the movies, i download all my movies from the net.

Biro

What annoys me the most about it is that you don't get your hard disk space back when you turn it off.

zagmund

I waited the week and checked back to see what it had recorded for me. There was all sorts of good stuff but as above it wasn't available under my subscription. There was a single program which I could watch out of maybe 15 or 20, but it wasn't something I would watch let alone record in a month of Sundays.

I turned off the function.

What a waste - so I have a 120g hard drive in the device but can't use half of it. Sky manage to turn a positive selling point into a negative - never mind just having a facility I can't use, but now I can't even use the empty disk space for other recordings.

z

mumhaabu

It is quite handy as I subscribe to Sky Movies but before I did it was a joke, I'd much prefer if it was left up to the customer to specify what the want and make it more like VOD (except overnight satellite download after picking what you want over the net). I'd also love to be able to turn it off fully giving me back the 80GB of the hard drive that is reserved for it.