Are Sky feeling the pinch??

kleefarr

Due to what I see as lots of customers leaving Sky for various reasons...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-38756577

murpho999

No doubt they have competition but I fail to see how the possibility of offer their services to people without satellite dishes is a sign that they are struggling?

The high horse brigade

This is the future, with customers moving to gigabit broadband connections it makes sense. BT Sport Ultra needs 26mbit and is delivered over broadband. More Ultra HD channels will be added like this

Capt'n Midnight

They can only offer these services in areas with good broadband so they won't be replacing dishes any time soon.

For SKY it means they can now get customers in places like apartments and rented accommodation where people couldn't use dishes.

In a Irish context it could be seen as a way to take TV customers from Virgin's core areas in urban centres, again in a lot of cases where people can't use dishes.

They paid £4.18Bn for three years of the Premier League a while back.

Gerry Wicklow

Useful in a city centre or somewhere where you can't use a dish but useless in the sticks if you have naff broadband.

Capt'n Midnight

Gerry Wicklow wrote: »

Useful in a city centre or somewhere where you can't use a dish but useless in the sticks if you have naff broadband.

true

But remember Eir and Siro are slowly rolling out Fibre to the home


To me it means SKY are less likely to move to Ka band because of the extra dishes and stuff which is good news for those of us enjoying the overspill on the normal Ku band.

Stasi 2.0

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

To me it means SKY are less likely to move to Ka band

Was that ever on the cards ? Is any broadcaster other than the white-elephant-that-is-Saorsat using it for anything other than feeds ?

lertsnim

I wonder if Virgin have considered such a move to get into areas where they don't have a network.

Cantona's Collars

lertsnim wrote: »

I wonder if Virgin have considered such a move to get into areas where they don't have a network.

They gave up the MMDS service which was used in rural areas and their main profit comes from broadband.It's not financially viable for them to go down that road.

TV via broadband is the future but dish based services are here for a long time to come.
The usual rule (if available) is Sky for pay tv and Virgin for broadband.

Gonzo

not everyone would want Sky/TV delivery over their fibre broadband service anyway as a certain chunk of the maximum connection speed would be used up to deliver the tv service to the customer. Satellite dish's will be here for along time to come.

The high horse brigade

Gonzo wrote: »

not everyone would want Sky/TV delivery over their fibre broadband service anyway as a certain chunk of the maximum connection speed would be used up to deliver the tv service to the customer. Satellite dish's will be here for along time to come.

Fibre to the home does gigabit, an ultra HD channel stream needs about 30mbit so hardly a chunk.

BT Sport Ultra is only available in the UK to satellite subscribers with 26mbit bandwidth as it's not able to be streamed from the satellite transponder.

dublinman1990

If Sky were to target their exact number of homes in the UK. Either Sky or BT will have significant challenges on their finances to provide funding for new Fibre Infrastructure to be built to use the online SkyQ service.

The majority of the broadband service in the UK is very slow. BT's best service on offer to the majority of the UK population is BT Openreach. It is a 70 year old copper network. Sky Fibre in the UK is using bandwidth from BT's own infrastructure to currently provide this service.

Another thing is that if people in these areas in the UK have a reasonable broadband service to use Netflix, Amazon, NowTV with Freeview services over an aerial in one go; they may feel that they already have enough content to meet their own needs. Their argument is that they would not see the value in changing to SkyQ either really quickly or at any time because they could see the value of SkyQ's content to be worth way less as to what is currently offered by other competing providers.

The UK's TV market is evolving more into an on-demand market. It is evident that this option works bests when it is much cheaper if you go with Netflix, Amazon etc for TV & Movie content.

Capt'n Midnight

Stasi 2.0 wrote: »

Was that ever on the cards ? Is any broadcaster other than the white-elephant-that-is-Saorsat using it for anything other than feeds ?

Most channels today are still SD

HD is gradually rolling out , [Rant]except Saorview[/Rant] and 4K transmission are starting and 8k is coming , NHK should have it sorted for the 2020 Olympics
http://en.kingofsat.net/ultrahd.php lists Sky Sport Bundesliga UHD and Sky Sport UHD
Lots more bandwidth will be needed in the future.


http://purplesat.com/index.php?p=1_117_KA-BAND-SATELLITES Ka channels including 'Soursat' One problem with Ka is that many LNB's are frequency restricted to a sub-set of the band. Unless you want to take a soldering iron to the filters.

Johnboy1951

'Soursat'

flutered

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Most channels today are still SD

HD is gradually rolling out , [Rant]except Saorview[/Rant] and 4K transmission are starting and 8k is coming , NHK should have it sorted for the 2020 Olympics
http://en.kingofsat.net/ultrahd.php lists Sky Sport Bundesliga UHD and Sky Sport UHD
Lots more bandwidth will be needed in the future.


http://purplesat.com/index.php?p=1_117_KA-BAND-SATELLITES Ka channels including 'Soursat' One problem with Ka is that many LNB's are frequency restricted to a sub-set of the band. Unless you want to take a soldering iron to the filters.

so all them old lnb's in a box are not completly useless

Capt'n Midnight

flutered wrote: »

so all them old lnb's in a box are not completly useless

Right now those old Lnb's would get you Freesat for free !
95% of what programs they say on the ads



If you want NEW movies you have to pay (or be naughty or buy dvd/blu ray)
or live sports then you have to pay or try all the other satellites in case they are FTA elsewhere , though probably in a different language.

Traditionally SKY bet that people are addicted to footy and they've been banking on that since 1992.


I don't know what % profit SKY make from movies but IIRC for NTL/UPC/Virgin the rights holders make the lions share and on theory was that dodgy boxes weren't clamped down on harder earlier is that they didn't affect the bottom line that much because the cable company didn't get that big a slice of what was charged



Ka band is one possible future.
Thankfully SKY Q didn't go this route with the knock on effect it could have for other European broadcasters.


For people on Cable or FTTH or in estates with a "fibre" enabled cab there's enough bandwidth already for IP connections.
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306

Below are the Internet download speed recommendations per stream for playing TV shows and movies through Netflix.

0.5 Megabits per second - Required broadband connection speed
1.5 Megabits per second - Recommended broadband connection speed
3.0 Megabits per second - Recommended for SD quality
5.0 Megabits per second - Recommended for HD quality
25 Megabits per second - Recommended for Ultra HD quality