Sky+ free from July

[dongratius]

People may already know this...sorry if it's been repeated. Just heard from a sales guy at Sky (trying to convince me not to cancel my sub) that sky+ will be free from July

Will probably subscribe again then

[johnny777]

So Sky are going to reward people without any premium channels with £10 per month.......What are Sky going to give those of us with Premium channels who get it free anyway?

[RayP]

Originally Posted by johnny777

So Sky are going to reward people without any premium channels with £10 per month.......What are Sky going to give those of us with Premium channels who get it free anyway?

How about BOGOF! Buy one Premium service and get the other free! It would maybe bring back thousands of dissatisfied Movie subscribers who have left recently and who subscribe to Sports.

Me thinks more changes may be afoot maybe in the HD area but the number of quality channels showing HD needs to increase. ITV and C4 are noticeable by their silence in this area but I digress.

[Starburst]

Originally Posted by johnny777

So Sky are going to reward people without any premium channels with £10 per month.......What are Sky going to give those of us with Premium channels who get it free anyway?

Well that's the glass half empty way to look at it


IF (and at this time it is still an if) this comes to pass then you have to look at it as SKY offering their proprietery DVR service to all subscribers which is more inline with how it should have been from day1.
The fact that marketing factors made it advantageous to offer it "free" to premium subscribers first isn't irrelevant, you would either be a premium subscriber anyway and thus save £10 or you took a premium package to get the "free" SKY+ and now you can cancel and save at least £6.50 a month.

[steve a]

This sounds like good news,any news for those who dont have sky + ,but just a normal box & standard subscription?

[Jonstone]

There were rumours about this earlier in the year and it never happened so I will believe it when it happens.

Although sky would no doubt gain some new subscribers at the bottom end of the packages by dropping the sky+ charge they would also get a fair number of people downgrading their service as they would no longer need the premium channels to get sky+ (I would be one of them)

Ultimately though there would be a great benefit to sky if they could get their entire userbase switched to sky+ boxes so we can all keep our fingers crossed that this rumour turns out to be true this time.

[dongratius]

I know i've heard it several times before...in fact if you do a search this topic goes back years rather than months. I had read somewhere that sky are under a bit more pressure to compete now....maybe that's why they're saying it will be free in July.

If it's not free then they're telling their sales staff to lie to customers to stop them from canceling their subscribtion...which i'm not sure is a great policy.

[earwax]

Originally Posted by dongratius

I know i've heard it several times before...in fact if you do a search this topic goes back years rather than months. I had read somewhere that sky are under a bit more pressure to compete now....maybe that's why they're saying it will be free in July.

If it's not free then they're telling their sales staff to lie to customers to stop them from canceling their subscribtion...which i'm not sure is a great policy.

Or the staff are under pressure and not permitted to give offers, so are lying on their own behalf?? I'd hate to believe that was the case. Peraps it may be adviaable to record the conversations with Sky .

As to johnny777's remarks, it does seem a little dog-in-mangerish to want to deny other folk benefits. TBH I wonder if it will ( assuming it comes about) be part of a rejig of mixes and charges. There are rumours of those too. Perhaps there will be more upfront costs to tale up Sky+ as well as ordinary Sky. IMO that could reduce churn, as personal capital had been committed. Is there still a marketing need for 'free fitting' etc? What's the situation outside UK and Eire for that matter?

[Jonstone]

As it appears sky do read these forums I would just like to say that we are all of course in favour of the drop in sky+ fee so that we can all become subscribers rather than us all hoping you do it so that we can all downgrade our packages

[Mac Man]

well I've just got SKY+ free from today

My old digi box conked out today and when told it was gonna cost £65 to get it fixed I suggested I might cancel my subscription.

I got put through to their customer retention team who offered me a free SKY+ box and SKY+ subscription to my standard family package - starting this week.

No time limit on the free subscription either.

well chuffed.

[Rock_fan35]

I just upgraded to Sky+ last week - install arranged for 16 May.

Just my luck to get an upgrade for half price offer on Friday after I ordered, then this possible news.

If they rework the packages so that Sky World got cheaper I'd be happy. Also as a previous poster mentioned, there is more competition and technology has moved on now - everyone with ageing digiboxes should be getting upgrades at reduced cost.

Anyway, I have a question about the Sky+ box too:-

What is the recording capacity of the current Sky+ and how does Anytime affect this? What I mean is does Anytime effectively halve the space available to me to records on by partitioning off an area of drive space to use itself?

Thanks,

steve

[Starburst]

Originally Posted by Rock_fan35

Anyway, I have a question about the Sky+ box too:-

What is the recording capacity of the current Sky+ and how does Anytime affect this? What I mean is does Anytime effectively halve the space available to me to records on by partitioning off an area of drive space to use itself?

Thanks,

steve

It's 80gig approx 40 hours based on an average bitrate with another 80gig for Anytime exclusive use.
Assuming you do get a PVR3 then the Anytime capacity is seperate to the user capacity so in effect it doesn't make any difference to your recordings if Anytime is operational or not.

[Degas]

Does this mean that you can sign up for the, say, £18 package and then get SKY+ for free, no premium packages required, if so, nice one and about bloody time.

[alternate]

Originally Posted by Degas

Does this mean that you can sign up for the, say, £18 package and then get SKY+ for free, no premium packages required, if so, nice one and about bloody time.

It would mean that if it wre true - which reamins to be seen.

[gavan]

Originally Posted by Starburst

Well that's the glass half empty way to look at it


IF (and at this time it is still an if) this comes to pass then you have to look at it as SKY offering their proprietery DVR service to all subscribers which is more inline with how it should have been from day1.
The fact that marketing factors made it advantageous to offer it "free" to premium subscribers first isn't irrelevant, you would either be a premium subscriber anyway and thus save £10 or you took a premium package to get the "free" SKY+ and now you can cancel and save at least £6.50 a month.

Offering it free sounds highly unlikely since that'll only result in more people dropping their premium subs. If you read around this forum, quite a few people are saying that they only keep movies or sport packs in order to get the Sky+ functionality which otherwise would have cost them a tenner a month (wiping out any savings from dropping the package).

On the other hand, maybe they hope to attract more subscibers to their basic packages. With Virgin offering catchup TV to all subscribers and Freeview recorder boxes under a hundred quid in Tesco, it's increasingly hard to justify the 120 quid a year charge to use your own HDD recorder.

I wonder which parts of their TV service generate the most revenue? Movies and Sports command premium prices but buying the content must cost Sky quite a bit too. OTOH, the 'multi channels' packs don't cost them very much at all from the looks of what happened with Flextech......