‘Pay TV and baseball are the only things I know anything about,” John Fellet, who founded Sky TV in 1991 and ran it for nearly 30 years, was fond of saying.
At least he knew his limitations. Fellet had a blind spot when it came to recognising the threat posed to his pay-TV empire by the internet. He dismissed Netflix as a flash in the pan. No one could match the generous mix of content Sky offered, or so he thought.
The subsequent exodus of subscribers to streaming platforms proved him wrong and nearly ended Sky. The company survived, thanks only to the inertia of subscribers who didn’t have a smart TV, and Sky’s ability to outbid Spark Sports for key sports broadcasting rights.
Admittedly, Sky has radically improved its streaming game since Fellet’s departure, but its new internet-enabled hardware devices show that it still isn’t totally at home in the streaming world.
Sensible decisions have been made with the Sky Box and Sky Pod, the two devices that will eventually replace the chunky, decade-old Sky decoders sitting in many living rooms. The devices are based on Android TV, a versatile software system with a wide range of compatible apps, the ability to log in with a Google account and the Google voice assistant built into the remote. As Chromecast devices, you can cast apps and content from your phone to your TV screen.
The sleek white boxes and remote controls incorporate good hardware design and are ready to deliver video content in 4K – the highest quality, which Sky doesn’t yet stream its content in. Last week, I installed the Sky Pod internet-streaming device for a neighbour. The process was a breeze. It took longer to find the Sky and Google log-in credentials than to physically install the Sky Pod and upgrade the software.
Sky Pod’s deal-breaker
The Sky Pod’s blue-tinged menu screen is a world away from the user experience the existing Sky decoder offers. But navigating to the live TV feature quickly revealed a deal-breaking limitation of the Sky Pod – it doesn’t feature TVNZ 1, TVNZ 2 or Duke in its electronic programming guide.
An inability to agree commercial terms for streaming content sees our state broadcaster’s channels excluded. You need to log into the TVNZ+ app available separately on the Sky Pod’s home screen to access live TVNZ and on-demand programmes.
I don’t care whose fault this is. Launching the Sky Pod without TVNZ in the electronic programming guide will kill its appeal for many users. It’s a real shame, because the Sky Pod is being offered initially to users of the defunct and much-missed Vodafone TV service that included TVNZ’s line-up free of charge.
Sky’s other device, the Sky Box, doesn’t have this crippling limitation, because TVNZ’s channels are offered on the box via a satellite connection rather than an internet one, which apparently makes all the difference from a content rights point of view. But the new satellite-enabled Sky Box has a different problem. Although it comes with a 1TB (terabyte) hard drive to store recorded programmes, it doesn’t have the Sky Pod’s cool features that let you jump back through 72 hours of content and restart a show from the beginning.
Instead, Sky wants you to set the Sky Box to record programmes and pay the ridiculous $15-a-month MySky fee to allow recordings. Yes, as a Sky subscriber you can go into the Sky Go app on your computer, tablet or smartphone to play Sky content on demand. But it should be available on the Sky Box, too. That’s the whole point.
There are other minor problems. The software interface occasionally lags. The Spinoff’s reviewer, Chris Schulz, laments the proliferation of info panels that pop up on the screen. “Why are they there? Why won’t they disappear? I just want to watch Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, and all I can see are bloody boxes,” he complained last month.
I have more patience than Schulz, but it’s clear that Sky has some user-interface and general software issues to fix. But unless it fixes those more fundamental limitations with the Sky Box and the Sky Pod, it’s hard not to see them as a downgrade from what Vodafone TV had to offer.
It’s an opportunity for Sky subscribers to consider whether they need to make the jump to a new box. There’s always the option to stay with the same hardware and wait to see if Sky sorts itself out. They could also consider ditching the hardware option altogether and slim down their Sky experience to what is available via its streaming apps.
TV galore – my setup
A couple of years ago, I stopped paying Sky for access to dozens of channels I wasn’t watching and handed back the set-top box. I miss only a handful of channels – Discovery and news channels CNN and the BBC, which are useful when global events demand wall-to-wall coverage. National Geographic, another favourite of mine, has since been dropped from Sky’s line-up.
But I didn’t cut the cord completely. I took up a subscription to Neon ($17.99 a month), which is available via the app on my TV screen and offers a decent subset of Sky’s SoHo channel content and TV shows and movies from across the Sky channels.
Neon now has a $12.99 basic subscription, which is available only in standard definition – an option if I want to save some money. It can be relied on to have at least a couple of big titles at any one time, such as Billions, Better Call Saul or Succession, which is currently in its fourth and final gripping season. The app is adequate, but not a patch on Netflix or Apple TV when it comes to design and ease of use.
For sports, I casually subscribe to Sky Sport Now, paying $44.99 for a one-off month pass or $19.99 for a week pass, which is usually enough to catch the season of sports events I’m interested in. I end up paying about $150 a year for Sky Sport Now, well below the $399 annual subscription cost. The trick is remembering to cancel your month pass before the new billing cycle kicks in and your credit card is charged.
Since the demise of Vodafone TV, I’ve bought a $10 UHF aerial, which is plugged into my Freeview-compatible TV, allowing me to pick up all of the free-to-air channels and access the Freeview electronic programming guide. I can record programmes to a USB stick inserted into the TV, allowing me to save episodes or movies to play back later, and skip through the adverts.
I’ve still got a subscription to Netflix, but am happy to swap that out with Disney+ or Apple TV+ based on who has the best shows in any given month. My total TV spend is about $588 a year – around the same as if I’d subscribed to Sky’s Starter package plus SoHo and occasionally accessed Sky Sport Now.
I’m still sending money Sky’s way but there’s little appeal in adding one of its white gadgets to my home theatre set-up.
