SKY - existing customer offers

happyhunter

I agree that Sky is an expensive entertainment, but what cheaper choice do you have if you want to watch live premier league football on TV? I mean proper clear pictures and not internet streaming. Going down the pub would cost more unless you restrict yourselve to half a pint of soft drink for the duration of the whole match. Also consider the time lost on travel to/from pubs.
If the choice is don't watch it live, wait for match of the day highlights, then your choice to have HD freesat is costing money too - you could save yourself money by watching built-in freeview and record on the old VHS. You can delay the viewing until recording stops after the show.

The following figures/comparison should be corrected, why multiply by 3 years of Sky monthly cost? A bit unfair I would have thought. Should have used the minimum term of 12 months. Or in some cases where people got it for half price for 12 months, you should base your comparison for that alone.

Leopard wrote: »

the cost of our Humax box was recouped in less than seven months by no longer paying Sky £37 a month for non-HD television on our Sky+ box. That was £444 a year. Every year. (And Sky's fee for what we were receiving has since gone up).

Multiply that by three years and you're paying Sky over £1,300 just to watch your own television. That could buy you the television itself, and a large one, at that.

Again, why are you comparing it against 3 years of full price Sky service?

Leopard wrote: »

People get so distracted by petty savings that they fail to see the big picture (no pun intended!). What's a £100 Quidco cashback, a £50 Tesco voucher and a £20 Marks & Spencer voucher, compared to paying £1,332 for the service over three years? Nice, agreed, but less than 13%. It doesn't even pay you back what the VAT costs you. There's no VAT at all on FreeSat's service. Because it's free. (And don't think that VAT isn't about to go up.)

Would BT Vision, or Virgin Media be a cheaper option for live Premier League football at full cost (before haggling)?

Leopard

happyhunter wrote: »

The following figures/comparison should be corrected, why multiply by 3 years of Sky monthly cost? A bit unfair I would have thought. Should have used the minimum term of 12 months. Or in some cases where people got it for half price for 12 months, you should base your comparison for that alone.

I did so because the point I was making – which you, yourself, then quoted – is that three years of not paying Sky £37 a month pays for a large LCD television, instead.

(One year of not paying Sky £37 a month only pays, within a fiver, for a 32" 1080p Sony or a 40" 1080p Samsung, instead. )

Seven months of not paying Sky £37 a month paid for a twin tuner FeeSat HD recorder, instead. With free viewing forever.

happyhunter wrote: »

I agree that Sky is an expensive entertainment, but what cheaper choice do you have if you want to watch live premier league football on TV? I mean proper clear pictures and not internet streaming. Going down the pub would cost more unless you restrict yourselve to half a pint of soft drink for the duration of the whole match. Also consider the time lost on travel to/from pubs.

You could always convert to Islam, foreswear alcohol and watch it for free at your local religious centre, I suppose (if the travel time to and from it was not overly burdensome). Not every culture regards boozing as an essential component of watching football. :beer:

happyhunter wrote: »

Would BT Vision, or Virgin Media be a cheaper option for live Premier League football at full cost (before haggling)?

Your new-found, non-bacon-buttie-eating football friends might even teach you how to haggle better, too.



But, in all seriousness, I agree that if you're nutty about watching football on television, Rupert has you by the nuts. That's what he set out to do, spent an awful lot of money to achieve and (being Rupert) succeeded. Now he needs to recoup what he spent. From you.

You have my sympathy: if Sky cornered the market on something that I particularly like, Murdoch would have me by the nuts, too.

happyhunter wrote: »

If the choice is don't watch it live, wait for match of the day highlights, then your choice to have HD freesat is costing money too - you could save yourself money by watching built-in freeview and record on the old VHS. You can delay the viewing until recording stops after the show.

But I'm not remotely interested in watching football.

And, more generally, I don't have Freeview HD built into my television. (Do you?)

That's why we did the deal we did.

At the end of our contracted year, when we cancel Sky again, we'll end up with a very large FreeSat HD receiver (only) but it'll be one that receives Channel 4 HD – which a pure FreeSat HD device doesn't. It will just have "Sky+HD" instead of "Humax" written on the front of it (and continue to freeze from time to time, needing to be hard rebooted – which our Humax box never does)

And we'll then use that as an HD tuner for our television instead of the Freeview SD tuner that was built into it.

This will enable us to use our (real) Humax HD recorder to record things on both BBC HD and ITV1 HD simultaneously while watching Channel 4 HD live on the television.

Which will save us having to buy a Freeview HD box to do that.

It's certainly a lot cheaper than junking our 52" Sony LCD to replace it with one that has Freeview HD built into it.

happyhunter

Mancunian wrote: »

thanks leopard, but can we keep on track regarding the offers - don't be so serious.

Yeah, now I know why you have stopped contributing to this thread
Same here, dropping off now.

ironman1

I recently got the Free Hd box, set up etc but had to pay the £10 subs every month. A couple of months in and a discount I was on (25% for six months) ended. So I phoned up and told them I was originally offered Free Hd as in not having to pay the monthly tenner for it. I basically waffled on and the bloke agreed to give me free HD for six months, making a note on my account that I was entitled to another offer after this ran out. Is there anyway they can go back on this? Just reading on here about smallprint etc made me wonder... it's only £10 a month saved but still handy. If I remove movies for example, can they start charging me for HD again to 'make up for it'?

Another point, if you dont want Sky, dont get it. Yeah it's expensive but if you make use of it, it's worth it. I hate giving them £50+ a month but freeview or these other boxes don't compare. Anyone who says otherwise is just silly as far as i'm concerned. You get what you pay for at the end of the day.

Leopard

ironman1 wrote: »

I recently got the Free Hd box, set up etc but had to pay the £10 subs every month. A couple of months in and a discount I was on (25% for six months) ended. So I phoned up and told them I was originally offered Free Hd as in not having to pay the monthly tenner for it. I basically waffled on and the bloke agreed to give me free HD for six months, making a note on my account that I was entitled to another offer after this ran out. Is there anyway they can go back on this? Just reading on here about smallprint etc made me wonder... it's only £10 a month saved but still handy. If I remove movies for example, can they start charging me for HD again to 'make up for it'?

In our case, the trap was set cleverly and the wording of it was very subtle.

The small (tiny) print in the offer which was made to us, by means of a large postcard, read, in part:

"If you change your option during the offer period, you'll pay the full current price for your new option."

Only by calling them and asking them, in a recorded telephone call, to clarify and confirm exactly what this actually meant in practice, did they admit that it meant that the deal one struck – and the package that one selected and specified at that time – are set in stone for the whole twelve months: if one then changed the package in any way (added or removed any channels, for example) the whole discount ends, immediately, on all of it. I suppose, knowing Sky, that one should be grateful that they don't then try to reclaim, retrospectively, the discount on the months you've already had.

I was concerned that adding HD to it (it had been a Sky+ contract when we terminated it, eleven months previously) might fall foul of this, so I got my companion to check that, before agreeing to anything. She was told that if HD was added to it from the outset (for £10 a month and not discounted), together with the chosen "packs" specified, it would form part of the deal. and not breach it. So, after calling back again the following day, and getting that confirmed by another person there, also on record, and faxing me the small print to examine, my companion contracted to it (I was abroad, and the former contract had been in her name anyway, for similar reasons).

I've since checked with the accounts department of Sky and the billing is set at £19.50 a month, for a year (half of £19, plus £10 for HD, every month). So all seems well. Unless we try to change any component of our package. Which we won't!

Everyone should check their own contract, and the exact terms of any deal they have struck, before trying to alter it in any way. If in any doubt, call Sky, discuss it with them on record and get it confirmed in writing before committing to anything. You're dealing with Sky, not Sainsbuys or John Lewis..

ironman1 wrote: »

Another point, if you dont want Sky, dont get it. Yeah it's expensive but if you make use of it, it's worth it. I hate giving them £50+ a month but freeview or these other boxes don't compare. Anyone who says otherwise is just silly as far as i'm concerned. You get what you pay for at the end of the day.

That's balls. You've clearly never had a Humax FoxSat-HDR FreeSat HD box and don't know what you're writing about.

We have both a Humax FoxSat-HDR box and a (new, Samsung) Sky+HD box and we run them side by side. The Humax box is far better engineered, the FreeSat user interface is far better, more sophisticated and easier to use, the Humax box never freezes and it has a lot of additional features.

Can you store Sky HD recordings on an external hard drive plugged into a USB port on the box? No. It hasn't even got a USB port. The Humax has two.

Can you rename your Sky HD recordings and organise them into a structure of nested folders (of your own creation and naming?). No. You can with the recordings on a Humax box.

I put a 1 TB hard drive into our Humax FreeSat HD box and have a 2 TB external hard drive plugged into its rear USB port. We also have a 1 TB external hard drive plugged into its front USB port. The Humax box can see and read and store things on both of them; thats built into its user interface and it's simple to use. You can connect an external hard drive as large as you like and you can swap them as often as you like, just by plugging them in.

Oh yes, and the Humax box will buffer the last two hours of what you've been watching and it can fast-forward and fast-reverse at 64x speed. When you're used to that, the Sky+HD box's 30x speed seems very sluggish.

So, upon reflection, actually, I do agree with you that "freeview or these other boxes don't compare" with a Sky+HD box. They're better. And I know that because I've got both. Have you? Or are you like those who "know" Windows is better than Mac OS X because they've never been "silly" enough to try a Mac and find out.

The only thing that a Sky+HD box has going for it is a more ergonomic handset. And Channel 4 HD.

I concede freely (perhaps not the best adverb to use in this context ) that if you do want channels that only Sky offers, Sky will provide them – at (quite) a price. But if you don't want them and don't have time to watch them all anyway, what's the point of paying (at standard rates) £28 minimum a month (£336 a year, every year) to watch BBC HD and ITV1 HD when you can buy a box for £150 – or one that records them, for £250 – and then watch them for free, forever?

We're now existing customers of Sky, again. But only for a year, only to get a free HD box and a second installed dish plus cabling for £60, and only so that we could get Channel 4 in HD.

At the end of our year, we'll just start using it as a simple FreeSat HD receiver that can get Channel 4 HD as well, to watch things in HD on our television while we're recording other programmes on our Humax box in HD. All for free and paying nothing at all to Sky.

By all means do otherwise if that's what you prefer. It's a free country (or at least it was, until Blair abolished your civil liberties) and it's your money (until you give it to Sky). We each have to find what best suits our own particular needs and recognise that it isn't necessarily what's best for somebody else.

Sigman_2

I just rang sky and got 6 months nearly half price, just said I wanted to go to virgin . No loopholes, no catches.. As long as you've been with them a while and paid your bills they'll look after u

Leopard, u need to get out more.. Seriously !!

Leopard wrote: »

The other thing that many people don't realise is that Sky just loves it when people try to scam Sky by making false statements to obtain a special offer to which they aren't entitled.

(For example, those who don't really buy the TV that a Sky offer states is what they have to buy to get the deal. Or cancel their existing contract and get their companion to apply for a special offer as a "new subscriber", claiming that they, themselves, no longer live there.)

Because then Sky again has them by the nuts. They can't enforce their contract against Sky if ever they need to, because they've obtained it by deception. But Sky, on the other hand, can enforce the contract against them, because Sky acted in good faith and they didn't.

The world is full of people who thought they were smarter than Rupert and could take him for a ride – only to discover, to their considerable cost, that they had made a very big mistake.

Like him you may not (although, personally, I always have) but underestimate him and you'll pay a very high price indeed.

If you think that Sky, or any Murdoch enterprise, would ever give away money or revenue for nothing, you don't understand Murdoch. You'd better be very sure that you've worked out correctly the way that he's actually going to benefit from what appears to be benevolence or you'll come expensively unstuck.

Niv

Leopard wrote: »

I concede freely (perhaps not the best adverb to use in this context ) that if you do want channels that only Sky offers, Sky will provide them – at (quite) a price. But if you don't want them and don't have time to watch them all anyway, what's the point of paying (at standard rates) £28 minimum a month (£336 a year, every year) to watch BBC HD and ITV1 HD when you can buy a box for £150 – or one that records them, for £250 – and then watch them for free, forever?
.

To watch BBC HD and ITV1 HD on a sky HD box you do not need to pay £28 pm, I pay £19.50 and recieve them and have never paid the extra £10 pm for the HD feature.

Apart from that I generally agree with what you have said.

Niv

macman

Why are you digging up a year-old thread?