OT: The Great Sky Rip-Off

["Kenneth Watt" <kennwatt@xxxxxxx>]

Folks,

This is a bit of a rant so if you're easily offended or strong supporter of Sky/Sky+ DELETE NOW, you have been warned!

I had to back to Sky, no choice really SWMBO *has* to have E4 and Sky 1
and since the demise of ONDodgy my life has been made insufferable
because of the loss.

So I go to sign up to Sky again...

For a start the package pricing is just plain stupid, I mean =A316 for
most of the channels I watch but to get all the movie channels it jumps
to just =A35 shy of the top package (=A337) and likewise if you add just three sports channels. So how much are either the movies or the sport
actually worth independent of the other? We simply don't know!

So I go for the "Family Pack" thing at =A316, fair enough any mov= ies worth
watching I normally but or get a loan of on DVD so that's not a problem
and I have little to no interest in sport. But the point is that the
pack prices are more or less rigged so as to allow little choice to the
customer as there is very little middle ground as it were, in fact none
IMHO. Clever pricing or a bit of scam, you decide!

I also find it strange that when I went to Sky Digital when it was first released, IIRC, the subscription was about =A324.99 for all the packages, oh, about five years or so ago. It's now =A337, not a bad increase in such<= BR> a short space of time, over 50% of the original price in five years,
imagine the car manufacturers trying that! ;)

Now the fun really begins!

I decide to go for the Sony STB, I know the installer so it wasn't
really a problem to secure one, which has optical digital out, the
thinking being that with that I can receive Dolby Digital (DD)
transmissions when they start.

Now since I have a spare Pace digibox I decided to investigate the
second subscription that Sky are never done advertising, only to find
out that on the top package @ =A337 a month you pay =A312 for it. On the lowest package @ =A313 you pay...yup, =A312! I am not impressed by that in<= BR> the slightest, in fact I think it's not far short of being an outright
scam...but it gets worse!

Sky are promoting Sky+ like it's going out of fashion and seem to be
doing anything to sell it to the masses but this golden goodie just
really cracked me up. Not only does Sky+ carry support for a direct feed of the dish, which is fair enough as well as support for DD when they
start that and, bear in mind, that no other PVR can offer that (or any
recorder AFAIK, yet)...but it would appear that no STB bar Sky+ can
decode the DD signal!!

So getting back to the Sony STB it turns out that, while it has the
optical out to support DD Sky will not be letting you enjoy those
transmissions unless you cough up for Sky+, the only platform that does
support DD. Now before some of the folks that have Sky+ start smiling
smugly to themselves just think what's next, will they charge you per
recording, or charge extra to receive two channels at once, or target
adverts on you recorder? Who's to say, the technology is largely already there, a lot can be done the recent incident with TiVo proved that!

More can be found here: http://www= .automatedhome.co.uk
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