Sky Without the Satellite

I think just about everyone is aware of the PVR (Personal Video Recorder), features that are utilised by set-top boxes from Sky, Virgin Media and freeview manufacturers, which provide the ability to record television programmes directly onto your hard disk – al-la Sky+.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get in front of my TV for this weeks 2 hour season finale of “Lost” season 4, shown on Sky One this Sunday. Of course I had set up the “Series Link” for the show and everything was due to be downloaded to the hard disk as normal. However, getting two hours of the main TV to myself to watch the recording is difficult, and it was obvious that an alternative arrangement needed to be made….

“Sky Player” is the on-demand, online version of Sky, which makes available a portion of the more popular shows, online, direct to your computer. A 2 hour, season finale proved the excellent excuse to sign up and trial the “Sky Player”. Signing up to the service was quick and easy – Sky actually allow you to authenticate yourself using either the last few digits of your bank account (the same account you pay your Sky bill with), or via your viewing card number. Once signed up, you download a small applet that lets you browse (after logging in), the available shows.

Once you’ve located and selected your show from the online library, depending on the show you have a couple of options – either play the show directly or download and watch offline.

I managed to watch a portion of a movie online – which aren’t available as downloads for obvious reasons, but the episode of “Lost” was available as a download, which I was able to play back via Windows Media Centre, much to my delight. The quality was excellent, especially as my laptop with its “BrightView” technology really showed off the video perfectly.

The only downside I found, was that I wasn’t able to watch the show ‘live’ (or slightly delayed), online as it went out on the regular TV transmission. ITV are showing all of the Formula One action, live, online this year – with the only downside being a slight delay to the transmission which goes out to the TV audiences (I expect this is down to the further encoding and transmission of the pictures via IP compared to satellite). If Sky could incorporate that into the “Sky Player”, they could change the way most people watch Sky Television.