Sky – What to watch?
Pat Heigham
I am annoyed at the current ads for Sky, advising that their new box can record 6 channels and watch a 7th.
I personally cannot obtain Sky, owing to a belt of trees blocking reception from the satellite and the cable supply is apparently limited to my block of flats.
But how many programmes are worth saving?
Maybe some films, but most of those are crap, because they have been cheaply bought by the TV companies to fill the wonderful airtime opportunity. (What a waste!)
Geoff Fletcher
Films on the box are also subject to cuts to make them fit the ad slots etc.. Not worth watching – go to the cinema and support the industry, or else buy them on DVD or Blue Ray.
As regards 6 progs worth watching – it depends on what you like. Some footy fans might record 6 different matches for instance. There are things worth watching on Sky – “Game Of Thrones” for example.
Pat Heigham
Hooray! Support the Film Industry! Thank you, as that is where I practised my craft on leaving the Corp – which taught me well.
Not being a footy fan, I had not considered their take on it.
Being a member of a Film Industry Guild, I frequently attended screenings put on in Pinewood’s premiere Theatre 7 (Now renamed the John Barry Theatre). The very best projection and sound systems around. And we always stayed to view the credits until the bitter end!
However, as some films might not have been that well recorded, or if from the USA, accents difficult to understand the dialogue – maybe bad delivery on the part of the actors, I took to renting them on DVD or BluRay from Lovefilm, and turn on the subtitles!
However, Amazon have decided to discontinue supplying Lovefilm DVDs by post, forcing one into downloading streamed material – a pain, because I could run a disc either in the living room or the bedroom, having installed players in both.
Dave Mundy
My wealthy neighbours had Virgin, then because a family member got a job with Sky they got a very cheap family deal, and now that has ended they have gone back to Virgin saying that the Sky internet is rubbish and it is far too expensive! They also had the Q-box installed, which is brilliant technology, but can you think of any 6 programmes, on at the same time, that you would want to record, and, more importantly, would you have time to watch them? Bah, humbug, go home Murdoch!
Bernie Newnham
What you do get with Virgin, if the area is cabled, is incredibly fast broadband. I started when it was Cabletel at 256k. Then I used to just let them upgrade me to the highest for the same price, till it got to 200Mb. At that point I decided to save some money and downgraded to 150Mb. Actually, I don’t think more than 30Mb is really any use. It’s perfectly fast enough.
Dave Plowman
The bottlenecks here seem to be near always at ‘the other end’ rather than the local download speed. But they never tell you that in the ads
Graeme Wall
Problem I had with Virgin was that after asking them for a quote I got pestered with two or three phone calls a week so I ended up telling them to shove their quote despite it being better than BT.
Dave Plowman
Because we already have Virgin cable here and have had for ages, I get a vast amount of ‘offers’ from Virgin. They must have spent a fortune targeting those like me. But neighbours who have it don’t give good reports of the service – and their cabinets in the street are often seen with the doors left open, unlike the BT ones.
I must be rare in having no complaints with BT after some pretty awful service from the likes of TalkTalk (I never actually went with them, but ended up there after a few takeovers)
I can’t comment on BT service as I’ve not needed it in about 5 years.
Bernie Newnham
I look after a flying club’s comms stuff. Back in April BT cut us off. We always paid our bills and they had no apparent reason and gave no notice.
It turned out to be an internal BT admin problem that dated back to 1991, when the London Transport Flying Club stopped being LT as there wasn’t any LT any more. It took two hours to get the phone back on, and a month to sort the broadband. I spent most of that month phoning ever more people in the Kafkaesque BT hierarchy, with people promising return calls that never happened and fixes that also never happened. Eventually I got as far as Head of BT Complaints – I have her direct number now. Even she couldn’t get it sorted quickly, BT is just too bogged down in its own bureaucracy. A ridiculous company. At one point I had Openreach saying it was fixed and the broadband people agreeing with me that it wasn’t. I asked, "why don’t you just talk to each other?" Answer: "We’re not allowed to – government (EU?) competition rules". So I had to talk to each alternately. Still didn’t get fixed, and all that was actually needed was a man to re-connect a wire in the box by the roadside 200 yards away. A ridiculous company.
When Virginmedia first started they had enormous problems with service centres from various old companies, and on the rare occasions I needed them I used to be passed around from place to place, once eventually back to where I started. At some point some proper MD took hold of the system and sorted it. I almost never need the service centre, and last time I did, it was all handled nearly instantly by robot.
Pat Heigham
A tenant in one of the flats in the block I reside in, had asked Virgin to install cable to his flat (not his prerogative, as this should have been done via our Management Company).
I came across Virgin’s contractors digging a cable trench across our lawn. When I pointed out that they needed a wayleave, which, as I was a director of the company, I knew they had not got – they skedaddled pretty quickly!
Later, our management company mentioned that at one of their other properties, Virgin had dug a trench across the carpark, and left it unfilled over a weekend, so no-one could get their vehicles in or out!
Ian Hillson
Living on the wrong side of a hill from Crystal Palace (with trees, so during the summer the analogue BBC 2 used to vanish completely in those glorious days), I subscribed to Homechoice – broadband plus telly (and pre-iPlayer programming) down your phone line. Then they decided to stop doing the telly bit and sold their internet franchise to Tiscali, so no reason to stay.
O2 offered home phone and internet (with static IP address) at a very reasonable price (being a mobile subscriber) so I gave them a try until they decided to sell out to Sky, who want to own you and everything you desire. Still a reasonable price for broadband, but they then charge you more for not being a Sky telly customer, and again even more for not being a copper conductor phone customer. They obviously bought out the O2 broadband bit to massage their customer figures, for a while at least until people like me left.
My phone line then went over to Calor (less than £100 a year line rental!) and all OK until recently they sold out to the Post Office. Needless to say charges have just increased by 50% if you just want a narrowband phone line without PO broadband (my internet is with PlusNet – now owned by BT, but thankfully independent of it).
By the way, if you are an old-school narrowband only phone user… BT prices will drop next year (but they’ll know if you have broadband coming down your line from elsewhere) so probably won’t reduce your line rental.
I’m put off Virgin by "security issues" – when I walk around my town (Richmond, not noted for high crime figures) I see cabinets unlocked with their doors blowing in the wind – both active ones (containing mains and broadband) and passive ones just containing phone terminals and jumpers. Anyone feeling a bit vindictive could have a field day with a battery operated hedge trimmer!
And if you feel like reporting unlocked (and sometimes lock-less) cabinets…. don’t bother, it takes an eternity to get them repaired.
Dave Plowman
Yes – same here in Balham. Never seen it with the BT boxes often nearby.
One other thing is the absolute mess they make of running their cables from street to house. Up the garden wall covered by a bit of tin and often showing where they run across the garden.
Not terribly well advertised, but you can reduce the BT line rental by paying annually in advance. And you can do this at anytime. You effectively get one month per year free rental, so rather better than having the money lying in the average current account.
Peter Cook
I have been with Plusnet, and before that Metronet for as long as I have had broadband. The service they give is good until a line fault emerges. That falls sadly into BT Openreach territory as BT own all the lines. In January a BT engineer came to fix my line which had a lot of noise on it, reminiscent of talkback through a wet triax. I was told that a connection in a block terminal up a telegraph pole was corroded. That was fixed and the line went clean again, well almost, but by June was noisy again, intermittently. In the last 4 weeks I have hardly been able to use the telephone and had visits from 4 engineers each with his own ideas and each one left a reasonably clean line which then got noisy within hours or days. Finally Wednesday a discovery was made that one of my microfilters had gone noisy.
Now when 2 years ago I went to fibre, I had a new primary socket put in. As this incorporates a decent filter, the microfilters should have been dissed. One Plusnet engineer who fitted the new modem/ router didn’t tell me and none of the BT blokes did until this week. The dead give-away for the diagnosis was that the sometimes deafening noise which swamped dial tone had no effect on my broadband. I was given all sorts of ‘reasons why’, but only yesterday did a smart BT man take out all the microfilters and clear the problem.
Of course I may have a whinge at Plusnet about having paid for a telephone line which was at times unusable and having had to wait in on 4 half days for BT, but Plusnet are rather at the mercy of BT. I am relieved to get my land line back and also that no one has yet invoked the ‘if it is your equipment at fault we will charge you’ clause. Well, it was a Plusnet filter not mine so that fault was down to them!
Chris Woolf
But Plusnet is BT…. and has been since 2007.
Dave Plowman
Yes. But then VW own Bentley. BMW own Rolls Royce. No problem providing a better service etc if people are prepared to pay more.
Peter Cook
Plusnet may be owned by BT but as Dave implied it is under different management. Indeed my old router is labelled BT Openreach.
The ‘Plus’ is that Plusnet gets better service from Openreach than TalkTalk and other ‘providers’ and again the customer service is ‘infinit(l)y’ better. Someone at Plusnet should have despatched a new router last week. When it didn’t arrive, I contacted them (yesterday afternoon); they apologised and promised me one in 3 to 5 days. It arrived today 1st class post. I have just set it up and got back to the download speed I enjoyed when I went to fibre 2 years ago. I suspect the BT modem.
A friend (BT customer) who moved house 5 weeks ago has been waiting for a line connection and router since then. With kids needing to do homework they have had to resort to using mobile data so the phone bills have been astronomical! Plusnet would in my experience pay compensation but I doubt BT will.
Ian Hillson
Semi-seriously though… when Studios became "Limited Resources" we all became aware of the term "Service Level Agreement" (SLA) – which when applied to telecoms companies means the length of time they can ignore you before fixing your fault. And just as "…little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum…" so ISP’s SLAs seem to have lesser phone carriers SLAs and so ad infinitum.
Dave Plowman
Many go on about the quality of service from their ISP – call centres etc.
I’d rather not have to find out how good they are.
Pat Heigham
I’ve just read a book by James Patterson, an American author, called “The Store”. It’s about a mail-order company that effectively tells you what you want to buy. And ‘owns’ you – because of tracking a person’s purchases and predicting what you need next. Curiously, this is exactly what Amazon is doing!
Worth getting out of the library and reading!
Hugh Sheppard
I’m not a Sky user – nor of anything knowingly traced to Uncle Rupert – but my understanding is that Sky Q enables viewing online instead of by satellite.
A sidelong issue is that internet content is not subject to Ofcom’s regulation, such as for impartial news, although this still applies for channels broadcast simultaneously. But if and when the day dawns when Sky services are only online, no such obligations would apply – at least until Government finds a way to regulate internet content. What a tantalising prospect for 21st Century Fox and Fox News which in June dropped its slogan of ‘Fair and Balanced’, replacing it with ‘Most watched, Most Trusted’. (Oh yeah?)
The BBCPA website has more on this under ‘Impartial Information’,
[and see below …]
Sky News
Mike Jordan
Sky threatens to shut down Sky News to aid Fox takeover.
Sob sob (or not) – apart from job losses in our industry?
Albert Barber
However it could be a ploy for Digger to threaten or influence the decisions of government.
Dave Plowman
Quite. Politicians don’t want to have less exposure on the media. Even more so from a right wing organisation like Murdoch’s.
Graeme Wall
Murdoch throwing his toys out of the pram?
Ian Hillson
Sounds a bit like "if we don’t get our way, then we’ll take our ball home"
Wish they would take their (foot)ball home,
Alasdair Lawrance
Which would you prefer? Sky News, or an ‘Anglicised’ Fox News?
Dave Plowman
It would simply be another Sky channel I don’t watch.
