Sky Stream has arrived in Ireland

I have a few pucks in my home house and tbh I love it it's great job . I wonder if i bought another puck and left it in my home house in another county would it work ?

I see there is a flash sale on Sky Sports for a tenner a month. I currently use Now TV.

Is the on demand better with Sky Stream compared to Now? Sometimes on Now it takes a long time for the catch-up of a F1 race to appear.

Adding can be done instantly online.
Removing needs a call - text and message support can't (probably more like won't) do it either.

Fed up with Sky stream. Added a BBC4 history program to my playlist last night and guess what, it hasn’t added it. Bitterly regretting changing from Virgin Media. This streaming lark is no use to me.

Multiroom still €20 a month, yes.

Slightly cheaper if you were paying for HD on Sky Q as HD is standard on Stream.

I don't believe Sky offer an in-home survey and set up service for broadband, at best they will ship branded boosters to you which will be added to your bill, but you have to position and set them up yourself.

HDMI only.

To be honest, if a TV service like Sky is important to you, stick with Sky Q. Otherwise Now TV and FTA is cheaper and more stable.

I was told a few months ago they don’t provide boosters anymore. Their customer service seems to tell you completely different things depending on the agent.

I originally called them about something else and they asked how I was finding the broadband. I mentioned in passing it was good except for one room at the back of the house. The agent said she’d send out a booster. A few days later an ethernet cables arrives in the post so I give them a call and I’m told they don’t do boosters anymore.

Got rid of the Sky router completely and using Eero since.

You should have a look at Eir TV. They charge €9.99pm for the basic TV service, and this includes the first Apple TV 4K puck. They don't advertise this - but since they use a standard Apple TV, you can add your own additional boxes without having to pay any additional monthly fee for multiroom - if you buy the boxes outright. Eir actually sell "reconditioned" boxes for €59.99 on their Eir Store website. These are very good value, and they still have a guarantee. This means that you can have TV in all rooms for the basic €9.99 subscription (plus the once-off price of the additional boxes). The Apple TV box is by far the best of the streaming boxes and since it is not proprietary to your TV supplier, you can continue to use it even if you move away from eir afterwards. (By the way, I am no Apple fan - and I don't use any other Apple products.) Eir also have an Android app, so you can stream from any phone or tablet to get additional screens using Chromecast etc. Eir are also the only streaming provider who have unrestricted cloud recording of the UK channels, including BBC. RTE don't allow any of the streaming providers to offer recording on their boxes, forcing the use of RTE player, or their catch-up services - but at least their player is available here (unlike BBC).

Same here! Playlist is a complete waste of time. Except my package is half the price of Virgin I'd be off. As soon as I'm out of contract I'm gone. The interface is all over the place too. I can't find anything good about it at all.

Where was the ad? The ad on sky is €25 a month for the basic TV and basic Netflix

In my experience it was a bit hit and miss. I had pucks that needed to be restarted as they were losing connection and having to watch stuff via players was a mess but the 4k picture quality was superb to be fair and price wise there can be some great deals

It was free for 2 months when I signed up. It does look very good. The HDR makes a huge difference.

I wonder will sky turn this service into an app that Smart TVs can just download an app for?

If the puck had a hard drive I'd say not a chance but since it's essentially relying on streaming for recording

If they did I would in all likelihood resubscribe (I recently cancelled the contract early without penalty due to the multiple issues with it).

The puck they supply is the worst "smart" device I've ever used - clearly built as cheaply as possible and vastly overtasked.

And while it had all of the popular apps on the pucks, it was easier to get up, grab the remotes, flip over to the Apple TV and watch it there because the puck was so bloody slow to load anything.

All of our pucks would require reboots several times a week and would often drop out when watching live TV ("Please wait for your programme to load…"), particularly if you were watching something live that would be quite popular. This was both on WiFi and Ethernet to the modem.

Whereas Now TV has worked flawlessly for me for years on an Apple TV for both on-demand and watching Sky Sports live. I've never had to reboot the Apple TV. The picture quality on the live channels is as good on Now TV with the Boost add-on as on Stream apart from the lack of 4K on Now TV. Therefore it shows Sky can deliver a reliable and consistent streaming experience so long as the hardware running the app is up to the job - which the Sky Stream puck clearly is not.

Looking at ongoing development on the platform doesn't bode much hope either - the most recent hardware release of either the puck or remote (or both) have an issue where, if the puck is put into standby for more than a few minutes, you need to powercycle the puck to turn it back on as the remote will not do so. While the most recent software update being pushed out is causing significant (in the order of seconds) issues with lipsync for a large number of people. And the remotes supplied seem to have an ongoing issue where some quite literally explode internally.

Just for balance, I have Sky Stream about five months now and have experienced none of these stability issues, so maybe you just got a defective device?

Freesat uses the same satellites as Sky, so Freesat is likely to be switched off within the same timeframe as Sky in the next few years. In the UK, Freesat is being replaced by Freely, which is the streaming platform for free-to-air services. Freely is very unlikely to be available within ROI. All the TV providers are likely to accelerate the migration to streaming in the coming years, because it gives them more control over advertising, as will as allowing them to retire the old coax cable & satellite TV distribution. They will likely force most users off satellite long before the satellites are end-of-life in 2029. Streaming can be made to work, given the right hardware and if the TV provider takes the trouble to negotiate appropriate rights with the the content owners. Eir TV works pretty well, and proves that streaming can work - although they are using the Apple TV 4K puck, and not a cheap proprietary alternative. They have cloud recording working properly for the UK channels. Sky and some of the other UK headquartered providers may take the view that the small and declining Irish market for pay-TV is too small to warrant solving the problems for Irish viewers? RTE appear to be denying the right to all streaming providers to allow cloud recording in Ireland, probably to force viewers to use RTE Player. With a declining viewership, they will probably be forced to change this policy soon. Here is a useful summary of the expected timeline for switch-off of the Astra satellites,

https://rxtvinfo.com/2024/how-soon-is-satellite-tv-switch-off/

You can skip the ads/promos on Sky Stream.

I highly doubt that freesat and the sky satellite service will go at the same time

When freesat was first announced it was as an alternative to freeview in order to allow the UK Public Service Broadcasters, or PSBs, to reach 100% UK population coverage. Freeview maxed out at about 90%. Freely is going to be internet based so realisitically it won't reach anywhere near the same 100% population coverage as freesat. Substituting freesat for freely would effectively remove PSB television for anybody without a high speed internet connection. Astra will likely have freesat as a customer for the foreseeable future

Sky's reasoning for wanting to get getting rid of satellite is cost saving and targeted advertising. These are important elements for a commercial TV provider but much less important for PSB's whose entire remit is based on maximising population signal coverage

I agree that when freely comes in it will likely be UK only, although I suspect there will be ways around this also

The PSB services are piggy-backing on satellites that have been launched primarily to carry commercial services such as Sky. If all the commercial providers move off satellite, the cost of PSB alone paying for replacement satellites is likely to be prohibitive. For the small % of "off-grid" homes in UK that want PSB but don't have suitable Internet it would likely make more sense for the British Govt to pay for Starlink connections to deliver Freely to them. If necessary, the satellite connections could be limited to Freely only. I can't see Freesat surviving in it's current form.

It's unlikely to be freesat alone paying for the Astra satellite. Astra would probably have other TV and broadband providers on their books. Sky would likely be a small player in that regard and their moving away from satellite doesn't mean the satllites are no longer needed

Not sure if it's possible to have a broadband satellite feed that would only work with one particular method but it would be one possible solution indeed.

With respect to Sky's eventual sunsetting of their satellite service, Freesat etc.

The youngest satellite at 28 East is Astra 2G whose EOM date is given for 2030 - however SES are known to squeeze the lifespan of their fleet quite well (e.g. Astra 1KR will have launched 18 years ago later this month and is still in active service at 19.2 East) and neither the three satellites at 28 East are operating at near full capacity with no suggestions of malfunctioning either.

Freesat isn't dependent on Sky's satellite operations - the Beeb, ITV, Channels 4 & 5 rent their own capacity at 28 East.

What is a problem for the longevity of Freesat is that the services from its main owners (the four broadcasters listed above) are dependent on spot beams generally limiting reception to the UK, Ireland & nearby continental Europe. Sky can keep their pay-TV service using pan-European transponders should they need to, Freesat doesn't have that luxury. At the moment, there's no satellite in the SES fleet that I'm aware of outside of those at 19 & 28 East that have Ku Band spot beams (and the two at 19 East are older than Astra 2G) that SES could redeploy to 28 East should it be required for continuity of Freesat services).

In terms of transferring subscribers from their satellite to their streaming service, there will be a number of refuseniks that are happy with their Q or HD+ service and have no wish to adopt Stream. Ultimately there will come a point for Sky where the satellite service is no longer profitable and will announce a switch off with those customers ending up in the dark if they don't take up Stream, but what amount of customers is the tipping point on that would be anyone's guess on here. Not to mention when.

As for the high-speed internet connection required for Stream, the amount of premises in the UK that are capable of getting at least a 30Mbit/s download speed via a landline stands at ~98% through a combination of FTTP/H, DOCSIS and VDSL2. Unless you're in a household that has people regularly streaming multiple 4K videos at once, Sky Stream is fine for such capable VDSL2 connections (you don't need a gigabit connection to make use of Sky Stream - even a higher-speed end of ADSL2+ would be fine on its own for single HD streaming, individual circumstances apply).

For the other ~2%, there's a matter of seeing what can be done with what's available locally e.g. wait for a roll out time for FTTP/H, or use what may exist from FWA, LEO satellite, 4G/5G internet etc. Ultimately all forms of broadcasting are subject to "best endeavours" and can never provide complete 100% coverage.

The licences for the six main Freeview DVB-T/2 multiplexes are due to run in 2034 IIRC - that seems like a nice round date as to when Astra 2G will probably become too old to remain in use for Freesat's services to promote a "dual" switch off. Time will tell as to what plans the UK has regarding traditional broadcasting platforms, the only thing for sure is that both terrestrial and satellite - in their present forms - won't last forever.

It took Sky around 3.5 years to convert its old analogue TV base to digital TV, and that was with a subscriber base of around 5 million. The current satellite subscriber base is somewhere between 8-10 million and while there was little reason to remain on analogue instead of digital (not to mention the "free" incentives at the time), a job transferring them on to Stream is not a directly fair comparison to what happened around 25 years ago. Expect some sweeteners to entice satellite subscribers to Stream, but I think 2028 - the date Sky reportedly has capacity contracted with SES at 28 East - may be too soon for Sky to close the satellite service down on its own.

'nuff blatherin' for now.