Is Sky+ Worth The Hassle?

jaggiebunnet

Have been considering getting sky + for a while but the constant stream of posts in here about problems keeps putting me off. Tell me folks, all of you guys that have Sky+ is the constant problems that bad, is it worth it? Also how many of you have multi room with sky+ ?


Thanks.

Mossy Monk

i have Sky+ and will never have a tv without a PVR again. with Sky+ i can watch programming when i want it and the box remembers to record them itself. i havent had any major problems with mine. just the occasional failed recording which are very rare

god's toy

Yes I think it is so worth it, I love the way I can just come home and all my programs are there waiting for me and I never have to think about what time something’s on or setting timers. PVR's are just darn cool and all the bugs in the world could not make go back now. (Not that i've had many bugs, I'm very hapy with my box)

kazzer

Im upgrading to Sky+ and multiroom in the next few days. Pardon the cliche but I think it will change the way I watch telly.

clarkbelt

There is a new Sky+ box out , 80/80 Gig hard drive , perhaps it might be more reliable than the previous one which had a failure/return rate in the region of 50% .
Also buy from a local independant retailer who will give you warrenty replacements if box gives trouble .

Tony

clarkbelt wrote:

it might be more reliable than the previous one which had a failure/return rate in the region of 50% .
.

where did you get this figure from?

Zhane

clarkbelt wrote:

There is a new Sky+ box out , 80/80 Gig hard drive , perhaps it might be more reliable than the previous one which had a failure/return rate in the region of 50% .
Also buy from a local independant retailer who will give you warrenty replacements if box gives trouble .

Where did you hear that? Iv only ever had failed recordings when the wire at the back of the box used to fall out. but some electrical tape sorted that, iv had none for about 8 months now.

Mossy Monk

50% return rate? do please explain

Cormic

Sky+ is the business. I have had a couple of failed recordings and disappearing space but a planner rebuild usually sorts that out. I never watch ads anymore, it's great.

L1011

Mossy Monk wrote:

50% return rate? do please explain

Its high, but not implausibly high - Gateway were allegedly turning over 80% returns or engineer callouts on their PC's before they pulled out of Ireland. Allegedly

Sparky

is sky+ worth the hastle?

My opinion would definatly be YES, i have a freesat box and i have to condition myself that this box doesnt have sky+ so i cant record five, so i can safely say its changed my tv watching habbits.

I dont have to worry about missing programmes, i can live pause a film so i can go for a piss.

And over the last 2 and odd yrs ive had it, id say its percentage of realibity is id say 85%, and ive found the recent software update to make it a bit more realable.

So go for it, youve nothing to loose

jaggiebunnet

Thanks lads.

clarkbelt you mentioned go for a local retailer - if I do this do I get the current price available on the sky website of 150euro + 15 for multiroom - or would they be charging me the full whack?

kevmac

In two years I have, like Mossy Monk, had only a few failed recordings.

Will be getting the HD version in 2006.

eirman

I highly recommend Sky+

A word of advice - make sure your installer does not stick with one the now, out of date 40 gig units. You should have at least 80 gigs available on your new box

dancin

Yep, I would recommend SKY+, definitely.

Have had it a little over a year now, and it's great. It took ages to convince the wife that we should get it. Her arguement being 'that we already have SKY and a video recorder, so what's the difference...' She's practically a ludite, so needless to say the video recorder was never called into action for recording, if we didn;t watch it we missed it.

Now we have recorder a bunch of films the kids watch over and over again. It's really great that they can pick up where you left off the last time - just like video tape, but with DVD quality image.

The wife has mastered the EPG, and is recording stuff all over the place. The series link is great, just find a program once, series link it and then more or less forget about it, the recordings just turn up :-)

The live pause, and rewind features are great, when interrupted by phone/kids etc... you don't miss anything.

We hardly ever watch 'live' TV any more, as we usually have a bunch of stuff recorded waiting to be watched. Typically we will record something while watching something else we recorded earlier.

When we do watch 'live' TV, find it annoying that we can't forward through the add breaks :-)

If you have the funds available, definitely recommend getting SKY+. Even the wife recommends it to anyone who asks her about it, a big change from the video recorder arguement of last year.

dmeehan

dancin wrote:

When we do watch 'live' TV, find it annoying that we can't forward through the add breaks :-)

same with me. when an ad break arrives i am always reaching for the remote to ffwd through them

LFCFan

Sky+ is the business. Couldn't do without it now. It's great not having to work your time around the TV and can watch stuff when you want to watch it and skip the Ads

clarkbelt

No doubt Sky+ is a smashing piece of kit , when it works .

I got these figures from speaking to people in the know , like..........

Five or six of the major Sky dealers in the country .
Malcolm Hardacre Pace Micro Technology ( although , he probaqbly won't admit to this failure rate )
Armstrong Electronics Ltd
Electroplus Cable & Satellite Ltd

Its no secret , I know of one customer who is on his fourth + box in the last 12 months . Like I said , hope the new 80/80 is more reliable .

clarkbelt

jaggiebunnet wrote:

Thanks lads.

clarkbelt you mentioned go for a local retailer - if I do this do I get the current price available on the sky website of 150euro + 15 for multiroom - or would they be charging me the full whack?

Same deal , u pay €299 for Sky+ or multiroom , with €150 discount , in the form of a cash back payment from Sky ( cheque actually ) Available from all good retailers , as they say .

Tony

clarkbelt wrote:

No doubt Sky+ is a smashing piece of kit , when it works .

I got these figures from speaking to people in the know , like..........

Five or six of the major Sky dealers in the country .
Malcolm Hardacre Pace Micro Technology ( although , he probaqbly won't admit to this failure rate )
Armstrong Electronics Ltd
Electroplus Cable & Satellite Ltd

Its no secret , I know of one customer who is on his fourth + box in the last 12 months . Like I said , hope the new 80/80 is more reliable .

Not exactly empirical eveidence now is it. You quote Malcolm hardacre and then say "he would not admit to it" so which is it did he say they have a 50% failure rate or not? Is it Five or six dealers? I've asked Seamus in Armstrongs and he says the failure rate is more like 15 % So I still dont know where you got this 50% figure from? I know one customer who is on his third box too but this does not mean the overall failure rate is 50% . Wild exagerattion in my opinion

clarkbelt

Tony wrote:

Not exactly empirical eveidence now is it. You quote Malcolm hardacre and then say "he would not admit to it" so which is it did he say they have a 50% failure rate or not? Is it Five or six dealers? I've asked Seamus in Armstrongs and he says the failure rate is more like 15 % So I still dont know where you got this 50% figure from? I know one customer who is on his third box too but this does not mean the overall failure rate is 50% . Wild exagerattion in my opinion

Yes Malcolm said this . ( no one involved in selling a product will tell you "sorry dude , this product is doogy " )

Would u like me to name the dealers ?

Everyone has an opinion , yours happens to be based on a conversation with Seamus Russell .

Anyway , it doesn't matter if YOU don't believe me . Were you not around when Pace went through something similar with early digi boxes ?, and the whole Grundig epsidoe ? Returns on satellite have reached these levels before !

pH

Well my failure rate is 50%, I'm on my second box now! (Survey size = 1)

Secondly - Sky+ is great, and if you're already paying for enough sky that they waive the monthly fee then go for it.

ffocused

I am on my 4th box in just under 2 years, and have considered scrapping sky+ after each failure but never went through with it. I have had to go through hoops to get the boxes replaced each time, but have not had to pay a cent for them or the engineer visits. (must have spent nearly EUR100 on phone calls though)
I am one of the unlucky ones but i feel that Sky+ is worth the hassle. Like previous posters i also rarely watch live tv anymore. Once you have had Sky+ there is no going back.
You will find many people complaining about it, but how many of these actually cancel?

kazzer

Im getting it installed in the next two days. So are these new 80 gig boxes out that long? If I say this to the guy installing it he probably wont even know what Im on about.

So do the new boxes look different or how will I know? Dont want to get stuck with a dated box!

Tony

clarkbelt wrote:

Everyone has an opinion , yours happens to be based on a conversation with Seamus Russell .

I did not put forward an opinion as to what the failure rate was, I was relaying what Seamus Russell told me.Unlike you I rely on facts to reach such a conclusion not hearsay. For my own part the failure rate is 10% for sky + but this is not a reliable figure as the sales volume is not enough to reflect the overall Irish market.

So are you now saying that the 50% is your opinion rather than fact? I think you sould have made this clear in your original post. I am aware of the failure rate of early pace models and based on my own sales the failure rate was 2% , having said that we switched to pansonic as soon as they were available so this figure is not accurate in terms of overall sales either even though volume was high. I still maintain that 50% is a wild exaggeration not based on the reality in the marketplace.

clarkbelt

kazzer wrote:

Im getting it installed in the next two days. So are these new 80 gig boxes out that long? If I say this to the guy installing it he probably wont even know what Im on about.

The 80/80 boxes are out since end of Aug 2005 , you should be ok .

kazzer

Cheers thanks.

clarkbelt

50% or 15%

15% return rate (excluding telephone and feild support to sort problem ) means the Sky + box is over 15 TIMES or 1,500% more unreliable than the current digibox . An alarming figure you would agree .

clarkbelt

jaggiebunnet wrote:

Have been considering getting sky + for a while but the constant stream of posts in here about problems keeps putting me off. Tell me folks, all of you guys that have Sky+ is the constant problems that bad, is it worth it? Also how many of you have multi room with sky+ ?


Thanks.

To answer your question , I think we have estlabished that ......

1. Sky+ is a fantastic piece of kit .
2. To date it is over 15 times more likely to give you trouble than a basic digibox .

Tony

clarkbelt wrote:

50% or 15%

15% return rate (excluding telephone and feild support to sort problem ) means the Sky + box is over 15 TIMES or 1,500% more unreliable than the current digibox . An alarming figure you would agree .

Alarming is not a word I would choose but it is an unacceptable failure rate and I've made my feelings known on this to the wholesalers as well as not stocking the 160 box which also has a bad reputation. Can we agree in future to use actual figures and not numbers derived from hearsay and speculation unless its mentioned in the context of opinion rather than fact.

Tony

kazzer wrote:

Im getting it installed in the next two days. So are these new 80 gig boxes out that long? If I say this to the guy installing it he probably wont even know what Im on about.

So do the new boxes look different or how will I know? Dont want to get stuck with a dated box!

here is what it looks like, the USB ports are worth looking for http://www.pacemicro.com/corporate/products/prodinfo.asp?PID=TDS470N

Clanc

I've had Sky+ since Nov 2003 and apart from a couple of weeks this summer where one of the tuners was acting up (eventually the problem subsided), I can't fault it in any way.

jaggiebunnet

Tony wrote:

here is what it looks like, the USB ports are worth looking for http://www.pacemicro.com/corporate/products/prodinfo.asp?PID=TDS470N

cool. what devices can you connect to the usb ports?

Lads thanks for all the feedback, I am definitely on for getting one, I need to speak to the better half and see if I can convince her of the benefits (ie no fights when i wanna watch the footie ) As far as failure rates I guess I will pray to the satellite gods...my digibox has never given me a problem although i did have to replace my lnb after about a year...must make sure i get that back from the sky+ fitter when they put in a quad lnb !!

ixtlan

Yes, I love the Sky+ box, and replaced the 40Gb drive I got with a 160Gb. No major problems. Sometimes the series links drop... sometimes there's a failed recording. Not often enough to be a big issue.

Obviously the failure rate is going to be higher than a regular digibox. You've got a cheap hard drive operating under non-ideal temperature conditions. I have no idea what the numbers are, but certainly some of them are going to fail. It's a risk, but the benefits are worth it.

Unfortunately, and this was obviously Sky's intention, it's hard to consider leaving Sky for another vendor who doesn't have an integrated dual-tuner PVR. I had a long discussion with a Chorus sales guy about this. Their position seemed to be "most people don't want PVRs" and next year "most people won't want HD". This is true now, but short-sighted. With Flat panel TV sales taking off big time, HD is likely to be a must have in a few years... so he should have at least had a road-map...

Ix.

jaggiebunnet

do Chorus have a road map?

Gwynston

While we're enjoying the benefits of Sky+ since getting in July (just too soon for the 80/80 box ) we do get a frustrating number of failed recordings. I reckon a failure rate of about 33%. We only record 3 or 4 things a week at the moment, but losing one of those every week is bit annoying. One week we had Lost fail on the Monday AND the Friday repeat and we so missed that double episode completely... :mad:

I think some of the problems might have been due to playing around with live pause etc. while recording another channel and/or recording two consecutive programmes on one channel while watching another, but we've been trying to avoid that recently without much better success

This week Lost failed (again) reporting a failure code of "9". Anyone know what that means?????

Tony

Sounds like hard drive, if you are still in warranty I would go for a replacement, if its a sky box try asking for the new 80/80

Gwynston wrote:

While we're enjoying the benefits of Sky+ since getting in July (just too soon for the 80/80 box ) we do get a frustrating number of failed recordings. I reckon a failure rate of about 33%. We only record 3 or 4 things a week at the moment, but losing one of those every week is bit annoying. One week we had Lost fail on the Monday AND the Friday repeat and we so missed that double episode completely... :mad:

I think some of the problems might have been due to playing around with live pause etc. while recording another channel and/or recording two consecutive programmes on one channel while watching another, but we've been trying to avoid that recently without much better success

This week Lost failed (again) reporting a failure code of "9". Anyone know what that means?????

kazzer

Just got Sky+ and multiroom installed. A new 80/80 box alright, I wasnt too happy with the installation though. The guy insisted on connecting the boxes to the phone line. Is this always necessary?

jaggiebunnet

kazzer wrote:

Just got Sky+ and multiroom installed. A new 80/80 box alright, I wasnt too happy with the installation though. The guy insisted on connecting the boxes to the phone line. Is this always necessary?

Pretty sure this is the case that it is required. Esp if you have multi room as they want to make sure the extra box is in the registered address.

Did you get the free installation - was wondering on that - how do the installers make any money out of it if the install is free and the box is half price?

How long did you have to wait Kazzer to get installed?

Mossy Monk

kazzer wrote:

Just got Sky+ and multiroom installed. A new 80/80 box alright, I wasnt too happy with the installation though. The guy insisted on connecting the boxes to the phone line. Is this always necessary?

yes. sky will know where the boxes are in case someone decides Johnny next door can have a cheap subscription

besides it is on the contract that you would have signed

kazzer

Yes free install, you pay for your box thats all. When you ring Sky they usually give you a date about a week ahead.

I wasnt too happy with the install I have to say. The guy cut the phone line to the sky box too short. So what did he do? He got another short length and connected the two together with an RJ11 double adapter. Very tacky indeed.

Anyways, all else looks good. I cannot believe the quality of the recording - superb.

Tony

jaggiebunnet wrote:

- how do the installers make any money out of it if the install is free and the box is half price?

Sky pay a fee about 3 months later to the retailer or install company.

watty

The only issue with Sky+ is that you buy it AND rent it. You must pay a sub even if you only want free channels.

The palyback IS the same signal as live reception, so no degradion at all, unlike Analog to DVD recorder or a Tivo

Tony

clarkbelt wrote:

Yes Malcolm said this . ( no one involved in selling a product will tell you "sorry dude , this product is doogy " )

I met Malcolm at Armstrongs this morning and he denied ever saying this. He told me that at its worst level last year the failure rate of sky+ was 24%

clarkbelt

Tony wrote:

I met Malcolm at Armstrongs this morning and he denied ever saying this. He told me that at its worst level last year the failure rate of sky+ was 24%

I told you so !

Anyway 24% is still unacceptable , considering plain old digiboxes have a failure rate of less than 1% .

Tony

clarkbelt wrote:

I told you so !

.

Nonsense, I dont believe he ever said this.

clarkbelt

I'm getting tired of this !





Tony said …………
I did not put forward an opinion as to what the failure rate was

Then Tony said ………..
Wild exagerattion in my opinion

Doh!






Clarkbelt said …………….

I got these figures from speaking to people in the know , like..........

Five or six of the major Sky dealers in the country .
Malcolm Hardacre Pace Micro Technology ( although , he probaqbly won't admit to this failure rate )
Armstrong Electronics Ltd
Electroplus Cable & Satellite Ltd



And then Tony said …………………..
So are you now saying that the 50% is your opinion rather than fact?

Doh!





Then Tony quoted these figures …………….

I've asked Seamus in Armstrongs and he says the failure rate is more like 15 %

For my own part the failure rate is 10% for sky +

I met Malcolm at Armstrongs this morning and he denied ever saying this. He told me that at its worst level last year the failure rate of sky+ was 24%



Maybe you should all meet sometime , why not in Armstrongs ? , then Seamus Russell could explain how he got a figure of 15% ( must not be talking to Malcolm ) you got one of 10% , and Malcolm got a different figure again ?

Is it not possible Tony , that the people I spoke to regarding Sky+ are closer to the truth on this . By your own admission Malcolm said his return rate was 24% . Surely this return figure together with failures sorted by telephone and field support could actually amount to 50% .




Clarkbelt said ……….
had a failure/return rate in the region of 50% .

Tony

The central problem here is that you came up with a figure of 50% and then attributed this to Malcolm from Pace who said no such thing by his own admission, thats the problem nothing more. He has no reason whatsoever to lie about this and your contention that he would not admit to a product being "doggy" (Sic) is clearly not true since he has said that at its worst the failure rate was 24% which is clearly unacceptable. If as you state he would not admit to this then why did he tell you?

People come on this forum looking for sound advice not misinformation from someone who seems to be portraying himself as being "in the know" for reasons that are beyond me.

clarkbelt

I have nothing more to say !

TCamen

We've had Sky+ @ home since 2003 and have never really had any major/recurring problems with failed recordings, though one thing that does happen more frequently on our Sky+ 160 box is that something will record and then refuse to play, even though it says it recorded for X minutes and is using X% on the memory.

Like everyone else, I really hate when I have to watch a live broadcast, generally I'll even put it on pause for a while and wait until there's a buffer built up to skip at least one ad break. The freedom of having so much space on the 160 box is nice - our original box was the 40GB one, so space-wise it wasn't great when something on RTE or BBC would take up like 6% for an hour, whereas now something like the 'Lost' double bill only takes up 3%

Quite frustrating @ the moment with the Live Pause being messed up with the latest Sky software update, I really miss it

Tony

TCamen wrote:

Quite frustrating @ the moment with the Live Pause being messed up with the latest Sky software update, I really miss it

Have you tried re booting? Seems to have sorted itself out on my 40gb box after a couple of power downs.