July 08, 2012

Sky Go monthly ticket - a legal way to acquire Sky Atlantic series

Sky Go is maturing. What was once a pretty poor, buffering and stuttering streaming service appears to have blossomed into a genuine, valuable service for Sky customers...and also for non-Sky customers too.
With a Sky Go Monthly Ticket you can watch TV from Sky online without the need for a satellite dish or annual contract. You can choose from a range of tickets and watch up to 40 live channels and thousands of hours of on demand shows in line with their subscription. What’s more, customers can register up to two devices and watch on both at the same time. You can watch TV with a Sky Go Monthly Ticket on a computer, iPhone, iPad, compatible Android smartphone or Xbox 360, and can sign up for as little as one month or choose to auto-renew your ticket each month. 
The minimum deal for non-Sky TV subscribers is a £15 monthly ticket, which gets you Sky1, Sky News, Sky Arts 1, Sky Living and (trumpets aloft) Sky Atlantic. You don't just get the live channels - you get the Anytime+ On Demand programmes for those channels too.
I've had a play and must admit I'm pretty impressed - playback is on a par with SD BBC iPlayer on my iPad and MacBook, and when I play the laptop's picture through my TV it looks good too on the larger screen.
A big disappointment for me is that Sky has blocked the output to a TV from the iPad or iPhone for some reason. Why?? Where's the logic in that when the feed from a laptop is permitted??
So if you're desperate for Sky Atlantic stuff and don't want to wait for the DVDs and aren't comfortable using "alternative sources", this could be a solution that might work for you. Personally, I think £15 is too much for what is really just a single (albeit highly desirable) additional channel missing from my VM package. Besides, the Blu Ray release of Boardwalk Empire season 2 is out in September and UK Atlantic programmes like Hit & Miss are appearing quickly on disc too, so maybe a tenner a month for a LoveFilm subscription would be a better value option.

6 comments:

Unknown said...

Netflix and lovefilm are 1080p for £5-6 a month, and offer far more than Sky Go does.

So as nice as it would be to have a legal way to get Mad Men, a single show certainly isn't worth £15 month, especially not in low end SD. Bundling Mad Men with a bunch of junk I'd never watch does nothing to change that.

Sky should be offering single shows on demand, and single channels on demand in 1080p for around 50p an episode or £2 per channel. As they'll never do that I guess torrents win again.

Nialli said...

Sky's promised Now TV service may prove interesting, as it looks like it will attempt to compete with LoveFilm and Netflix, initially with movies this "summer" but eventually with "entertainment", too.

Chris said...

Wow, you got Sky Go to work on a MacBook? Not many people have, if the forums are any guide. It's a problem with Microsoft's Silverlight, it would seem. I just installed Windows XP on a partition on my MacBook solely to run Sky Go, which runs fine under that OS from the past.

The Unsung-Hero said...

Use hide my ass VPN service (£50ish quid a year) and get Netflix - because it's location specific using a VPN connection to the states gives you masses of shows you can out put on your iPad to the tv.

Ross said...

When you say the output is blocked from an iPad to TV, do you mean just wirelessly through AirPlay or blocked altogether, even with a Digital AV adapter to do TV out through the iPad?

Nialli said...

@Ross I mean by wire (I don't have Apple TV or Airplay available to test). I've got an iPad 2 and tested with both an HDMI cable and a VGA - neither worked with Sky Go or 4OD but the iPad play out is fine with BBC iPlayer and ITV Player. There's a whole thread on the Sky User Communities about it btw