New Sky thinking: Media giant makes dish-swerving move on Netflix territory Brit broadcaster Sky has signaled the end of the satellite dish with plans to make all its channels and content available online. In its half-year results, the pay-TV and broadband business said it will launch Sky without a satellite dish and stream all its channels and on-demand content over IP. "This is a major development …
As an aside, isn't the comment about this being the death of the satellite dish wrong? I don't think Sky are saying that, they just say that they can reach other potential customers if they have an IP service.
It may be that Sky customers ill move away from satellite dish usage but that's not what Sky appear to be saying.
There's some stuff that they show where the only alternative in the UK is to pirate it (eg, Game Of Thrones).
And of course, given the choice between paying Murdoch and piracy, the choice is clear.
Obviously I take the legal option, wait, why are you all laughing?
UK is already taking steps in this direction ... The main aim of pumping Government money into 'high speed broadband' is not to benefit customers but to allow broadcasters to avoid their expensive broadcast transmission costs, making the punters pay for it by moving the infrastructure cost of transmission from the push service of the broadcaster to a 'pull service' by the punter hidden under the carpet that is the cost of 'high speed broadband'. Then sell off that wireless space for 5/6/7g and a nice massage of the Government's balance sheet.
Before this can happen in the UK there needs to be 'super high speed broadband' available everywhere, with sufficient backbone capacity, to prevent subscribers leaving in their droves due to buffering video streams ... that'll be another 30 years then ...
allow broadcasters to avoid their expensive broadcast transmission costs, making the punters pay for it by moving the infrastructure cost of transmission from the push service of the broadcaster to a 'pull service' by the punter hidden under the carpet that is the cost of 'high speed broadband'.
Hate to break it to you, but punters pay for everything all the time anyway. Do you not think it makes sense to deliver everything over IP, or should we continue maintaining multiple distribution systems?
Could we better spend the (presumably) tens of millions currently being spent sending men up ladders to fix dishes to walls?
TCP/IP is not designed for broadcast TV, compared to normal broadcasting methods.
a) I said IP, not TCP/IP. The bloke lower down said UDP, also runs over IP. It seems to work just fine for most things we put over it so far without being designed for it.
b) I very much doubt there will be much broadcast going on. Quite a lot of streaming, no broadcast.
Also you can save on expensive geosync satellites, their channels, and everything needed to upload the signal to them. You'll still need to provide enough storage and bandwidth to deliver on-demand contents to users. While without a good broadband deployment many users would be cut off. Maybe Italy is one of the first because FTTH rollout is going on quckly, and most of the country should be cabled by 2020.
Anyway, the name "Sky" is no longer a good one.... you'll get the signal in the basement, not on the roof <G>
So Italy - as with the hype for South Korea, Japan etc - why are these countries Internet rankings not far-far better??
https://www.cable.co.uk/broadband/speed/worldwide-speed-league/
Italy is 13 places below the UK and 16 below Ireland in Global Broadband rankings. The much vanities Spain FTTH only has an average of 36 Mbit/s.
If Sky/Xomcast wanted an existing territory to test ‘dishless Sky Q over the Internet’Ireland and the UK seen the most promising.
You raise an interesting point. Obviously Sky TV are going to stick their streaming servers next to their Sky ISP endpoints so they have great connectivity.
If that means that (eg) BT don't have such a good route to the TV, who should pay? Should Sky TV pay for better connectivity to their customers on BT? Or should BT pay so that their customers have better access to Sky TV?
After all, the customers are already paying both companies, Sky for their TV, and BT for their internet.
What ( I think ) would be cool would be for TV manufacturers to do a deal with Sky and add Sky as a dummy source ( with the Sky Q EPG, a minimum processor/ram speed, big disks for recording ). Although there's no reason they couldn't do that already if they licensed Sky's card standard.
Doing away with STB's would be nice. Although I do like my Sky Q remote control *.
Sky moves the cost of manufacture to the end customer and gives the user an incentive to not switch to Virgin/BT, customer doesn't have to find somewhere to hide the ugly STB and wires, TV manufacturer gains a selling point.
* Why are most TV remotes still so awful in 2017?
TV remotes are mostly awful because most people buy the cheapest tellies - because it's mostly a commodity market and so most players don't make very much profit. So they don't invest anything in getting their software right, or making their hardware ergonimic.
Sky are very profitable and decided to make their boxes mostly nice to use.
What ( I think ) would be cool would be for TV manufacturers to do a deal with Sky and add Sky as a dummy source ( with the Sky Q EPG, a minimum processor/ram speed, big disks for recording ). Although there's no reason they couldn't do that already if they licensed Sky's card standard.
You can blame sky for this. What should've happened is you should just be able to buy a CAM from sky and use whatever receiver took your fancy. (The CAM is a module that the card goes in, it handles the decryption) If you have a satellite enabled TV that's what the big hole in it is for. This would have allowed a separate market for Satellite/DVR boxes from the content they're used to consume.
However, sky had good lawyers and managed to get round this requirement. (I heard a (probably apocryphal) tale that the regulations require they sell a CAM module, so they did, just the one; once).
If it weren't for corporate greed then we'd maybe have managed to decouple the provider of the shows from the provider of the equipment, however that never really happened, in fact Sky ended up integrating even more, they now control the entire hardware production chain.
This is why their subscriber base can decline year on year but their profits not. It's only now that the likes of Netflix are providing some decent competition this is starting to change.
Personally, I would've subscribed to Sky years ago if they'd allow this as I use a PC for my TV PVR functionality, and would happily have subscribed if I could've used Myth or TvHeadend rather than Sky+ for my recording needs.
It's no different now. Just tech that changes, not people.
My IPTV comes from a bloke on the internet, costs 40 english pounds per annum and works flawlessly.
We* used to only be a few people, but then our wives/friends/colleagues who saw it or heard it mentioned realised that we get (insert content they want and pay for) *as well as* the football.
My tivo box hasn't been plugged in for months. All comes down the via the net.
*we being mainly football fans who stopped paying sky 100 quid a month.
One slight problem for the consumer is that with a dish, things are relatively easy to troubleshoot for the engineer who will come round (dish, LNB, cable, STB). However if it's all over broadband then there's bound to be the usual (ISPesque) fobbing off that the problem is almost definatley not with Sky, but elsewhere. So in the worst case you'll have to juggle both Sky and your ISP to sort things out. On an equally bad case then Sky may be your ISP. And then throw in the entire BT/OpenReach thing that the ISP should be doing.
I'm sure it'll be mainly fine when it's all running, but wouldn't like to be around when something goes wrong.
Although I hate to say anything good about BT, whenever I've needed an OpenReach engineer to come out they've been first class.
BT the company can be awful but the BT engineers I've had have always been excellent. One time my landline went kaput late on Friday afternoon and BT's response was "it's a domestic line and we only work on those Monday to Friday, so Monday at the earliest, maybe Tuesday depending". 10:30 Saturday morning the door bell goes and it's a BT engineer saying "I was in the area, so I thought I'd come and fix it now". 15 minutes later and I had a working landline again.
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