End of Sky dish installations coming soon ?

Obviously prices will be lower as skys overheads with installing sats etc will be reduced.

😂

There is a massive legacy of existing users that would need help upgrading. Dishes only last 10 or 15 years particularly in coastal areas but they are now cheap and don't require a really good internet connection.

Sky can't really give out free hardware to all existing customers and they want to lock customers into 12+ month contracts or provide hardware that only works with a subscription. I expect dishes will still be used by sky in 10 years.

Click on the link in post no 1 and you will see where Sky have denied this.

That brings up an interesting point related to nation security etc. Part of the reason for Saorview is to ensure Irish people have access to Irish TV in case of security/ political reasons.

In other countries the likes of netflix were forced to carry local TV channels so no user would not have access to in country created content and news.

Assuming everything is going online and I know some RTE content is online, I wonder will we get some sort of Irish streaming box or even a UK/Irish free or low pay streaming box. The financials may not be there but there is a big trend to many under thirties not having or watching any Irish TV content. A beefed up rte player type streaming dongle with live TV might help, but ideally it would need UK channels to be a success.

Just in case you're not posting that in jest, it would actually increase Sky's overheads even when shifting a portion of these onto the customer.

The more prosaic point is that streaming models are unsustainable replacements for broadcasting infrastructure. If I transmit a channel, then the cost to me as a broadcaster is fixed and reception by viewers is relatively cheap, making it very cost-effective to reach a wide audience. Streaming models do not achieve that, a broadcaster is going to pay per-viewer and the viewer also has to pay not inclusive of additional subscription costs.

I don't see Sky dropping satellite transmission in the short term, but in the long term it may go away as Sky moves away from being a provider of linear television and towards being another Netflix. The leverage for them is in having exclusive rights to certain content for the UK/IE markets.

It could be another raw deal, like the insult of being told to pay for a SkyTV subscription to be able to watch public service broadcasts (before Saorsat), for customers but time will tell.

That is more related to decisions made here by broadcasters than Sky per se. UK & other countries have had extensive free-to-view feeds unscrambled on standard bands and satellites for a long, long time.

FTTH rollout in the UK has been pulling its finger out of its backside in the last 18-24 months or so - according to thinkbroadband.com, who monitor the state of broadband technologies in the UK, the amount of properties in the UK that can now (October 2022) avail of at least a gigabit speed FTTH connection is close to 42%. Once you include all technologies capable of providing gigabit speeds (largely helped here by Virgin Media's Docsis network) that figure hits nearly 72%. Overall, the amount of UK properties that have at least a 30Gb downspeed connection is over 97% - while 4K video streaming does require a good amount of head room in terms of bitrate, 1080p streaming video using HEVC or VP9 video codecs are able to easily deliver excellent picture quality over 3-6Mb/s bitrates (even ADSL would do here in the majority of cases if carrying just one or two such streams).

At current rates of progress, the percentage of premises in the UK getting a gigabit capable FTTH connection is increasing by about 1% per month (that's 1% of the overall premises where all premises = 100%, not just a 1% increase from the previous month). It's a little more than 1% most months, some moths it's slightly less than 1%.

There are also some regional differences with these figures. For example a higher percentage of properties in Northern Ireland can avail of a gigabit connection (88.5%, 87.6% via FTTH/B) compared to the London region (82.6%, 47.5% via FTTH/B), a fairly startling figure when you consider the metropolis of London compared to NI where the urban/rural population divide is much more similar to that of the Republic than that of GB.

(Source from Thinkbroadband - https://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/9354-october-2022-update-on-broadband-availability-across-the-uk-nations-and-regions )

As it is when it comes down to DTH satellite platforms - the method of watching linear channels being broadcast in pretty much all developed countries is on a downward trend and will inevitably continue to do so. Many minor channels (especially niche area & timeshift channels) are either closing or have already moved to online distribution only. However, "core" channels that have a long heritage of decades in their countries (state broadcasters, public broadcasters & major commercial stations) should still be fine for some time to come - the only question is just what how long "some time to come" means, and what linear channels they may refer to.

Footprints for the new Hotbird 13F & 13G satellites aren't publicly available right now, but I suspect that they both have at least a widebeam very similar to the current birds at 13E - namely one that extends from the Azores in the west to the western Chinese border in the east, and from Svalbard & eastern Greenland in the north to the UAE in the south. It's been for several decades now a very popular hotspot for channels to reach their diaspora in the EMEA regions alongside more localised platforms for Italy, Poland & Switzerland. It's able to cover a relatively large area for such interested broadcasters at a position that has millions of dishes aimed at it. SES have also announced replacements for some of the older birds at 19.2E themselves. However it is currently clear that at least in the short to mid term DTH satellite platforms remain a viable market in Europe, but beyond that is uncertain. While the Hot Bird & Astra 1 satellites are intended for DTH broadcasting, should needs allow they can always be used for other data based uses in the future, Eutelsat & SES being able to shift around satellites in the Clarke Belt etc.

Another thing to think about is that at 28E the current Astra 2E/2F/2G satellites are expected to reach their end-of-life by the end of this decade, given that these tend to have 15 year "missions" lifetimes these days (although satellites that don't suffer from notable malfunctions & aren't driven hard most of the time can extend this life by up to approx. a handful of years (especially if MEV vehicles become more common) before eventually succumbing to going into inclined orbits, and eventually a graveyard one) and I'd be pretty sure both SES and the major broadcasters on 28E (Sky, BBC, ITV, Channel 4 etc.) are having to think hard about future plans for the position - especially for channels that are currently on UK/Ireland beams from the current constellation, easy enough with broadcasts on a "Euro" beam but any potential satellites that are already in-orbit brought in to take over the current three going dark will likely need a capable/similar spot beam - and off the top of my head SES don't have too many of them outside of 28E above European skies.

How does this work from the perspective of the delay in transmission you get on live sports? Is there any plans to reduce this as more and more people rely solely on streaming for their tv?

All the talk elsewhere is that sky have secured satellite carriage for the upcoming years. But it does look like streaming is their model going forward.

The big issue will be if they abandon development of sky q. It already looks likely they will never for example add the ability the view UHD on anything other than the main box. Q is already buggy enough without being abandoned.

Maybe abandon is the wrong way to put it but much like the the way the sky hd boxes now only get critical updates. I would be pessimistic that there would be any real improvements to Q in future, in terms of both software and hardware.

I spoke to someone working in Sky a couple years ago and he mentioned he was trialing Sky via a streaming box. I wonder was it Stream or was he talking out his arse.

...good quality broadband is still patchy in rural areas, until thats resolved......