Free movie downloads for Sky Digital customers

MSE_Martin

Sky By Broadband

What’s it all about?

Sky By Broadband’s a new service available free to Sky digital customers which allows you to download and watch selected movies and sports on your PC. (Well, of course it is free, but you're already paying for Sky services anyway).

What can you watch?

You have to be signed up to the relevant package in order to download. You can get:
* Sky Movies, if you subscribe to Sky Movies 1 & 2
* Sky Sports, if you subscribe to Sky Sports 1 & 2

At the moment films on offer include Spiderman 2 and The Day After Tomorrow, as well as sports clips, such as Premier League footie.

How does it work?

Go to Sky by Broadband to download the application to your PC. You’ll need to have a PC with Windows XP. A film typically takes an hour to download and you have 30 days to view it in.

renegade_si

Martin, I've been using this since December and would just like to add the following :

1) I've always been given 30 days from when you start doing the download of the movie, not when its complete! With my current poor broadband internet connection (and movies being 1gb .WMV files) this sometimes takes 10 days to download (and not an hour!) which leaves much less viewing time! The quality is ok, around SVCD for those in the know, but those download thus far only have stereo sound.
2) Please be warned that this is peer to peer, and as a result there are two applications which run as "services" ie will start up as your machine starts up. It will share your partically downloaded files and thus you will get upload traffic. Please be careful therefore if you are on a capped broadband service, particularly one which limits total usage (ie download and upload) as downloading a 1gb file actually could mean you upload this amount in the meantime, making the total amount 2gb!!

grilli

how are the files protected? surely there will be a way around the protection.

crube

I've been using this for a couple of weeks now and have been pretty happy with it. The only very minor gripe I have is that on my 1Mbps connection, sometimes the downloads can be a little on the slow side. I could be wrong but there seems to be slower and faster times - i.e it's not consistent, maybe it's to do with traffic on there. As for the picture quality, I'm very pleased with it indeed - I've found if I play them via Win DVD rather than the default WMP 10 I get a much better full-screen picture.

renegade - do the services startup regardless of whether you are using SBB(Sky By Broadband)? I looked at my services a few days back and there did seem to be more than I remember running. Can others only download from you if you are actively using SBB? I was actually thinking of going down to 6GB usage limit from 20GB but this could make me think twice as I have been downloading quite a few movies/sports clips etc.

Edit: I'm presuming the services are 'K Host' and 'K Service' as I haven't seen these before. They are each using 30MB+ of RAM :eek: I have 1GB of RAM but for people with 512MB and 256MB these things running could cause problems with other tasks. Surely they should provide an icon in the taskbar to switch them off?

crube

Anyone else got any comments etc?

sammyy

I tried this for the first time last night.It took about an hour and half to download a film,but I only have 512mb broadband.


How did you play on another media player?Mine will only let me play it on WMP.

crube

sammyy wrote:

I tried this for the first time last night.It took about an hour and half to download a film,but I only have 512mb broadband.


How did you play on another media player?Mine will only let me play it on WMP.

I set it to download movies/clips etc to my desktop - I changed the default directory by going to 'settings' after I log in. It's underneath 'change your sky.com account details'. When I have downloaded something I go to the folder and right click on the movie/clip etc, and go to 'open with'. It should give you an option of opening it with any of the media players on your system. Hope this helps.

sammyy

Every time I try to open with a different player it tells me 'This file is under DRM protection and cannot be played'.I'm not a big fan of WMP and would rather play it from a different program.Any ideas?

crube

sammyy wrote:

Every time I try to open with a different player it tells me 'This file is under DRM protection and cannot be played'.I'm not a big fan of WMP and would rather play it from a different program.Any ideas?

That's strange, I've only tried it with Win DVD and that worked fine. I don't really like playing stuff through WMP either as you can only get a really good quality picture when it is like half-screen. Which programs have you tried to open it in? Maybe I just got lucky with Win DVD.

rammell

Call me naive, but I've got a very simple question..... why?

A Sky customer has paid for a premium subscription service so that they can watch a digital broadcast on a (presumably) quality television set. Why would they want to download the same broadcasts and watch them on a computer monitor, with all the hassles that have just been described by those who have recently tried the service? I assume they can't be copied and/or forwarded to other people. I'm obviously missing something here.... or maybe I'm just a technophobe but I don't understand why anyone would want to use this service.

Cheers!!

sammyy

In answer to your question of why,it's just curiousity really.I don't have sky+ so its handy to download them and watch later,anyways in answer to crube I have tried Nero and power dvd.I don't have Win dvd.