Sky+ Replacement - Advice wanted

twodogsbluearmy

Hi,
I currently have Sky+ (and have had for over 12 months) with Movies and Sports (costs something like £53 pcm, O my god! :eek: £636 a year:o ), both me and my wife think it's fantastic, however we never have much time to watch TV since having a baby 15 mths ago. So it's just a big waste of money for us.
we know we can phone sky and get 3 months free if we say we're leaving etc, but at the end of the day we're still with sky and it's all hastle. so we have decided to change, but what to ?

We want to keep the basic digital channels (i.e. the freeview ones), and have the ability to use something like Sky+ (with an EPG and to record and "series link")

NTL don't do digital in our area so are not really an option.

So i'm guessing the only option available to us is to go for a freeview box with a hard disk (something like the Humax http://www.humaxdigital.com/uk/products/pvr-9200t.asp) is this the best product?

Has anyone else made the switch that can advise?

thanks.

Kintoo

I may be wrong but if you have had sky for 12 months and you cancel don't they leave the freeview channels on and you keep the box?

twodogsbluearmy

Kintoo wrote:

I may be wrong but if you have had sky for 12 months and you cancel don't they leave the freeview channels on and you keep the box?

That would be cool if that were true (lets hope so), as this would be an ideal solution.
I'm sure i have read somewhere that you have to pay £10 pcm to use Sky+ if you don't have the full channel package. I thought that i had read somewhere that they also disable your sky+ EPG etc.

billywhizz

Not done the switch myself but with a baby on the way your comments have got me thinking!

Anyway, yes Sky do leave the free to air channels on if you cancel, but you will lose the Sky+ ability to record anything, so it just becomes a freeview box. If you wanted Sky+ you would need the basic Sky package and then have to pay £10 per month extra for the recording function, so not cheap.

The Humax looks like an excellent piece of kit, I have been thinking the same myself that something like that would be a suitable replacement for Sky+ without the ridiculous expense.

If you do get it please report back on how you have got on with it as I may well follow suit.

JezCooke

I recently looked into dumping Sky, but would not want to be without Sky+ so looked into the alternative PVRs, unfortunately all of the freeview PVRs have showstopping flaws (from my point of view at least), the EPG data transmitted over terrestrial freeview does not contain series link information for example, some of the freeview PVRs try to mimic it with searching on title but it's not the same! Many (all?) would not allow viewing a program that was still recording. There were other things that I forget now, the most highly rated freeview PVR seems to be the Topfield (or Toppy) but overall the interfaces and features seem to be far behind that of Sky+. Freesat PVRs can't take a Sky smartcard so can only get the free-to-air channels (i.e. not the free-to-view channels that even though they are free still require a smart card to decode).

In the end I decided to stick with Sky so am now on 6 months half-price (£18.50/month including movies and Sky+ I think is perfectly reasonable). Will decide what to do when that runs out. In your position I'd probably try and get a deal off Sky then when it expires just take out a Sky+ only subscription (£10/month) that way you get Sky+ with the free-to-air channels. A decent freeview PVR will cost around £300 anyway so that could buy two and a half years worth of Sky+ subscription anyway!

Omertron

I have the Humax PVR and it's an excellent product. There are a couple of issues that might niggle you if you were so inclined, the first is that it does not have series link, so you need to either set a weekly schedule for the program or set it manually. The second (until Humax fix it later this year) is that there are a limited number of recording slots you can use (currently 20, due to increase to 50 in the next update).

I don't know which boxes JezCooke has been looking at but the two contenders I looked at, the Humax and the Topfield, both have chase play (being able to play a program while it's recording) and have dual tuners allowing you to record two programs and watch a third live (something Sky+ can't do).

The humax box itself is about £170 and I think the Toppy is about £220, both have 160Gb hard drives.

JezCooke

Omertron wrote:

I don't know which boxes JezCooke has been looking at but the two contenders I looked at, the Humax and the Topfield, both have chase play (being able to play a program while it's recording) and have dual tuners allowing you to record two programs and watch a third live (something Sky+ can't do).

Sorry, I stand corrected on this, it looks like this was enabled by an over-the-air update so the information I had read a while ago must have been out of date. Yes I remember reading about watching a third live programme, that's a nice feature but it does have to be on the same mux as one of the programmes that's recording (unless both recording programmes are on the same MUX) due to there only being two tuners (still there's only six muxes so guess the odds are good! ;-) - can you still pause the live channel though?!).

Omertron wrote:

The humax box itself is about £170 and I think the Toppy is about £220, both have 160Gb hard drives.

They're good prices, couldn't match those with a quick froogle search.

waveydave

I myself am in this situation - wanting to cut my sky payments down butstill wanting sky plus etc.

Read a few posts where people have suggested phoning up to say you will cancel and them offering X a mount half price etc but i didnt get any luck Grrrrrrr

How did you go about getting them to cut the bill price down ( JezCooke )

Omertron

JezCooke wrote:

Sorry, I stand corrected on this, it looks like this was enabled by an over-the-air update so the information I had read a while ago must have been out of date.

Yes, it was done in June/July time.

JezCooke wrote:

Yes I remember reading about watching a third live programme, that's a nice feature but it does have to be on the same mux as one of the programmes that's recording (unless both recording programmes are on the same MUX) due to there only being two tuners (still there's only six muxes so guess the odds are good! ;-) - can you still pause the live channel though?!).

Yes you can pause the live channel while recording two others (I just checked ) Hughes Direct for £169 or Home Cinema TV for £175 courtesy of Digital Spy

Stevev99

Just a thought but have you considered BT Vision which is due out any day now?

http://www.btvision.bt.com/what_you_get.html

You seem to get a PVR with all the usual live pause & rewind plus it's a Freeview box and lets you watch football, movies, music etc on a pay per view basis and no monthly subscription.

As soon as it's out I'll be ditching Sky and going for it!

You do need BT Broadband to get all the download functions.

JezCooke

Stevev99 wrote:

Just a thought but have you considered BT Vision which is due out any day now?

http://www.btvision.bt.com/what_you_get.html

You seem to get a PVR with all the usual live pause & rewind plus it's a Freeview box and lets you watch football, movies, music etc on a pay per view basis and no monthly subscription.

As soon as it's out I'll be ditching Sky and going for it!

You do need BT Broadband to get all the download functions.

These IP based services are very interesting and I firmly believe that in the future we shall see Internet/TV/Phone/mobile etc all merged into a single IP based network. However the IP based TV services are in their infancy, services such as this one from BT and Homechoice in London are just starting to spring up. Since they are just starting broadcasting in standard definition at the same time that Sky is starting its Hi Def broadcasting (yes there's only a few channels and it's way too expensive at the moment but it's there) the IP services have got a lot of catching up to do.

Anyway long term it will be great as Sky should finally get some decent competition (and we should see prices falling and services improving).

Back to the original question just remembered TopUp TV have launched a new PVR service (it downloads channels overnight and stores them on it's harddisk for viewing on demand). Looks interesting but there's still a subscription and while cheaper than Sky there's also a lot less content.