Sky+ after its been cancelled

Darron_2

I have subscribed to sky for many years (i hang my head in shame) and when SKY+ came online i bought my very own box...
how the hell anyone lived without it is unfathomable its brilliant, and easy to use. (this is not a spam post honestly).

BUT when i cancelled last month due to the fact that i have very little time to watch movies/sport, i thought, ah well, there's plenty of free channels and i still have loads of recordings on the drive to watch.
now that i have cancelled however, i cant record anything... and that includes the free channels.
so after a call to sky i was told yes i can record but i need a subscription to one of skys packages.
"which is the cheapest that gives me the + function back" i asked
"you need either sky sport full package or sky movies"
"and how much are they?"
"£33 and £35 respectively".
to say i'm furious at the ccost is a slight understatement, considering it should be FREE anyway.
What i'd like to do with the board of directors at sky would make burning at the stake look like a birthday present.
I bought my box and the channels are free right.
well, something stinks and i'd love to be able to do something about this...write my MP or monopolies and mergers commision or whatever... does anybody know of what can be done without me paying more dosh to sky?

thx
Darron

Darron_2

forgot to add that i cant watch the recordongs i made before i cancelled either.

astronaut

The need for the permanent £10 subscription is the one drawback of Sky+ (I've only had Sky+ for 2 weeks and so far it has exceeded my expectations )

I have read on the http://forum.digitalspy.co.uk forums that you should be able to use Sky+ after cancelling your main package but you do have to check carefully that they do not cancel the £10 / month Sky+ subscription

The cheapest package to get you the Sky+ for free is Sky Movies 2 plus one if the Sports channels (£30.50)

You can also try the Value pack (£13 I think) plus the Sky+ subscription.

Don't know if you will succeed in getting just the Sky+ restored but it would be worth a try

However it is also definitely true that you can only replay recordings that you still have a subscription for - this is partly technical (what gets stored on the hard disk in Sky+ is exactly the encrypted signal that has come in so you need a valid card to decode it) but also commercial (people could just subscribe to Sky movies every other month and record lots to watch in the month when not subscribing)

If you really don't want to subscribe to Sky then at £120 / year just for a PVR it could be better value to get one of the dual tuner freeview systems that also record to hard disk

Nicholas

It's true that you do not have access to any recordings from a subscription channel once you have cancelled your subscription to that channel, but it also works the other way around:

If you record from a channel that you do not subscribe to, and then subscribe, those recordings become accessible. Bet a lot of people did not know this.