Sky is to make its full TV service of hundreds of channels available without the need for a satellite dish for the first time, as it looks to stem customer defections to rivals such as BT.
The pay-TV giant suffered an 18% plunge in profits at its UK business in the last six months of 2016 has announced that it will launch the broadband-delivered TV service next year.
Jeremy Darroch, the Sky chief executive, said it would allow Sky to target up to 6m households across Europe who cannot, or will not, have a satellite dish.
There's already the broadband-delivered 720p NowTV service of course but what the appetite will be for the full Sky TV service (and cost) will be interesting and possibly challenging for Virgin Media and other services. Too early to know whether it will include any 4K UHD services or what the hardware would be.
Sky and Discovery are also trading blows in a carriage dispute that could result in twelve Discovery-owned channels disappearing from the satellite service at the end of this month.
More details on both stories here and at http://www.whathifi.com/news/sky-q-tv-service-wont-require-satellite-dish-2018
4 comments:
Brilliant.
Sky can rent Virgin's network! Maybe we would finally get Sky Atlantic.
cancelled all my sky services due to the discovery channels issue and got told from sky that the channels will go as sky do not see them as good channels :-P here i come virgin media hopefully the v6 box and the fibre broadband is good along with the customer support :-)
I think all Sky customers should think long and hard before they jump ship to Virgin. Virgin at some point need to renegotiate with Sky and Discovery for there channel packages. Since Sky has only got stronger since Virgin sold them all the channels they owned, it could well be a rougher ride for Virgin customers with more extreme bill shock. Don't forget we lost all the basic Sky channels for months due to a similar issue before and a couple of cheap movies in no way compensated for that. I think a better solution would be to look at Freesat/Freeview and over the top services such as Netflix. Of course what Sky, Virgin, Discovery and all overlook is these price rises are tempting more people to use illegal services based on Kodi
Will people jump from Sky because of the (temporary?) absence of a dozen second-rate channels? I don't think so. Discovery may be a big name but it's hardly a big channel with compelling content these days. Content is so widely available these days I'd be surprised if anyone made it a sole determinant of which provider they go with - I'd suggest availability, price and reliability are more important.
What's interesting about Sky Q being available via the Internet is that it could mean every VM customer has a premium TV service choice that is not dependent on them having a dish stuck on their home. It then comes down to price and that could be to the customer's benefit. I say "could" though because we don't know the details of what Sky will be offering and chances are it will tie customers to Sky's broadband offering, which is not in the same league as Virgin Media's and could be an anchor on the service Sky can offer, especially 4k/UHD content.
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