Report - Sky to cut substantial number of installer jobs in UK

icdg

Being widely reported including by Sky itself and mentioned in the Sky Stream thread over in cable. May be a prelude to the end of dish installations.

https://news.sky.com/story/amp/sky-to-cut-1-000-roles-this-year-amid-shift-from-satellite-services-13060106

galtee boy

While Sky via satellite will be around for quite a while yet, the push towards Sky Stream will intensify, you'll see more and more advertising from Sky to get new customers to go for Stream rather than Q.

helimachoptor

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121701670#Comment_121701670

My wifes aunt who lives in NW Mayo (next stop America), got in NBI there a few weeks ago, and got sorted with a streaming service. They would have been Sky customers well over 20 years. MiL who lives close by is happy with her dish (doesnt want to pay for NBI). However, I expect most people in the area will switch to streaming services reasonably quickly.

The other issues faced by the western counties is that each time there was a reasonable storm, it was generally 2 weeks miimum to get a visit, i worked in Sky for a good few years so always had to sort it, but for joe soap, it was a frustrating period.

road_high

I’d imagine with digital downloading that’s been heading the way of Video rentals for a long time now

dxhound2005

Language can be made to mean anything they want it to mean. What was their everyday activity for decades, installing dishes, has now become "specialist installation".

"Increasingly, customers are choosing Sky Glass and Sky Stream which don't require specialist installation, and that has led us to change the number of roles we need to deliver our services."

Change is on the way. But it took about 40 years for electricity to reach the more rural areas of Ireland. I read that fibre can be even more hit and miss, with some urban areas still not served. Sky will pay very little regard to the fibre rollout of lack therof in Ireland. But without checking, Ireland could be ahead of GB in fibre. Satellite is still the ideal way to serve out of the way places with TV. They could hardly switch off the satellites if large numbers of customers have no fibre. Whole other story, but where there is fibre, or even wireless, the pirates are taking a big chunk out of Sky's potential income.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121701774#Comment_121701774

“They could hardly switch off the satellites if large numbers of customers have no fibre.”

You would think not. But it should be kept in mind that not so long after Sky’s carriage deal with Astra ends (2028), Astra’s satellites at 28.2E are due to reach their end of life. Will Astra replace them? Hard to know tbh.

Gerry Wicklow

So what happens when a storm takes down your fibre? Your left for days with a coat hanger and RTÉ?

dxhound2005

Astra 1P and 1Q look to be coming to 19 East, and SES are saying they will serve Europe until at least 2040. A site call Satandpcguy is saying that 2H and 2I are coming to 28 East, but it seems very unofficial.

Gerry Wicklow

Given the time it takes to design, build and launch a satellite, the decisions to make these new birds would have been taken years ago. AFAIK satellites are designed for a service life of at least 15 years.

I'm reminded of the bizarre situation when BBC did a documentary on "How to build a satellite". As it turned out we were watching the show via the featured satellite (Astra 2E) by the time the show aired.

waywill1966

With streaming will the likes of BBC and Channel 4 be geoblocked here?

icdg

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121705271#Comment_121705271

They should still be available on pay TV platforms (Sky, eir, Vodafone, VM) but once Freesat goes then there isn’t likely to be a free option - the eventual streaming replacement Freely (yes that’s really what they are calling it) is likely to be geoblocked.

We were never meant to get them for free. BBC’s stance was always that we had to pay BBC Studios through our cable provider. It was a happy consequence of satellite delivery because the satellite’s not yet been invented that can cover Lands End to John o Groats and also all of NI without also covering ROI too.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121702020#Comment_121702020

To be fair I had VM and its predecessors NTL, Cablelink, and RTER for years and never, even in the time when cabling was mostly above ground was there an outage that lasted what could be categorised as “days”. The extreme scenario, which happened once in a blue moon, was that an outage over the weekend might not have been repaired until Monday. Don’t think that happened since the 1990s. The move to HFC and subsequently FTTC/FTTH has lessened the risk of it substantially.

TAFKAlawhec

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121702209#Comment_121702209

There was never an Astra 1I satellite - there was Astra 1H then Astra 1K that became a write-off and was replaced by Asktra 1KR. There's been no official announcement for the replacement of any of the Astra 2 birds at 28E so this "Satandpcguy" is guessing at best. As it is, the youngest of the birds at 28E is Astra 2G and it has a planned lifespan until ~2030 and in addition the recent Astra birds have been shown to be quite reliable and capable of going well past their lifespan, so another handful of years (especially if an MEV is used like is currently in place at 27.5W for Intelsat 901) is not out of the question.

There's currently 72 transponders in use for broadcasting at 28E spread over three satellites (this includes several on the West Africa beam on 2G, but excludes data only transponders that also includes the Middle East beam on 2F), those 72 should be capable of being spread over two of the satellites if need be, and with broadcasters in the process of moving towards using DVB-S2** transponders as well as a gradual decrease of linear channels being broadcast and thus fewer transponders being needed, there should be plenty of capacity for several years to come up there, in my estimation. The main headache will be for those broadcasters requiring UK spot beam coverage - none of the other Astra or SES satellites currently in orbit other than those stationed at 28E have similar spot beams that could be called into service if problems start to develop on 2E, 2F or 2G. Sky OTOH can happily broadcast their services encrypted on European beams without having to worry about the never ending thorny issue of programme rights.

I suspect we'll never see direct, spanking new replacements for the Astra 2E/2F/2G satellites at 28E in the future - if capacity is needed at that orbital position beyond this decade, Astra will arrange something - possibly even hiring a satellite from a different operator e.g. Eutelsat.

** This just started recently, with all stations that were broadcasting on 11538 V DVB-S up until a few days ago now broadcasting on 11523 H DVB-S2 8PSK with the former transponder now empty - though bizarrely all the SD stations that were transferred over remain in the MPEG2 video format on the new transponder, which either seems a waste despite the capacity increase, or an encoder for the transponder needs upgrading, or the rumour of Sky's STB backend systems only able to handle MPEG4 video for HD broadcasts and not SD broadcasts actually being true (and if so, was a major planning fail).