Sky Stream has arrived in Ireland

THanks, mine came back working 'normally' later last night. As I'm coming up to renewal shortly, it helped me greatly in my decision to switch to Virgin's streaming box.

I left Sky Steam in August and they wouldn't budge on offering a discount, got two texts the last few weeks offering Stream and Netflix for €20 for 12 months. Good offer but I already locked into Eir TV for 12 months. Worked fine for me but wasn't worth the €50 out of contract.

No issues with buffering for us.

I'm currently flicking through channels whilst 2 kids are gaming one on Xbox one on PlayStation. Wife in the kitchen watching RTE player and daughter upstairs on her phone.

No issues at all - we have 500mb broadband but normally speeds are about 400-420

Stream box is on WiFi in the TV room approx 10m from our closest Google Nest WiFi mesh point

Yiz might be interested in my initial thoughts on the Virgin streaming box.

TLDR; It's better than Sky Stream.

I think you will be waiting a very long time, the broadcastes, including Sky, want us to use their players. The ad revenue is the decider, most skip over ads on recordings and that doesn't make money.

You'll be left waiting.

Probably not enough people but people will begin dropping these streaming boxes if they can't do or won't do what you could achieve with an old VHS recorder.

There is no technical reason to re-introduce hard disks into Streaming boxes

What about the below technical reason?

Recently, the BBC stopped them from allowing the recordings. (RTE had never allowed recording on streaming)

My sky q box or Freesat HD box can, always will be able to, and always could, record from BBC and RTE.

Furthermore I am hearing of dodgy services allowing cloud recordings on all channels without restriction. Eir, Sky and Virgin are all competitors with each other but they also all compete with the dodgy crowds, they can't afford to offer a sub-standard service

From the POV of sky they could potentially go down the cloud streaming route but they will need to get RTE and BBC on board or not give them the option to pull out as Eir have done as they are 90% of what many households watch and if they don't allow it for some BS rights reason Mr Dodgy-Box will step in and fill that void

Can you elaborate on what you mean by main channels? Or would that cause legal issues.

I'm not trying to be smart with my question, I've never owned a dodgy service so just want a feel for it

The issue of the BBC/RTE not allowing cloud recording is a technical issue because Eir, in this instance, created the technology to allow broadcasters to pull out of the service. If that ability wasn't technically implemented it would not be available to broadcasters

The EE TV Box Pro available in the UK is an internet and Freeview enabled box that allows recording from either the IPTV channels or the Freeview ones. So there is no technical reason for recording not to be a thing on sky's stream or glass services with a hardware change

The model may indeed be a win-win for sky but it is anything but for the consumer, most households will stubbornly hold on to their Q or +HD boxes until the very last day that they can - and after that there's no guarantee that sky stream will be chosen as the replacement considering they have lost their USP

It's highly unlikely to happen. Margins in traditional pay TV subscriptions are on an inevitable downward trend because of declining viewership.

A hard drive is an added expense, is added complexity in your equipment and generally the most likely thing to fail in the field.

When the alternative is to stream everything, either live or timeshifted, and have cheap-as-chips equipment with no moving parts, that's added margin.

Then factor in you can do unskippable ads, that are relevant at the point of watching, can gather far more metrics around viewership than you could before to target said ads, let people watch "recordings" on any device (not just the TV) and revoke playback rights at a moment's notice because you can make extra money selling them to a higher bidder, why would any operator want to revert back to the PVR style of before?

The only reason PVR's were let take off was because in their heyday capturing the off-air broadcast to disk was the only reaslistic means to allow timeshifting to happen at all. No longer the case.

Besides the cost issue for Sky, I think as mentioned already that people's viewing habits have just changed so considerably at this stage, that the demand for a SKY+ stream box is rather limited.

I think people are also generally familiar/happy enough with catch up services nowadays and it's even rarer that people want to have/keep an offline back up/recording of something. We already kind of have a SKY+ stream box with Sky Q anyways.

I believe the days of the PVR might be numbered perhaps, except for the true tech-heads, lol.

RTE are making demands - for example with Virgin 360 using replay function RTE won't let you skip the adverts. You can't record RTE with a streaming box.