New Sky thinking: Media giant makes dish-swerving move on Netflix territory Brit broadcaster Sky has signaled the end of the satellite dish with plans to make all its channels and content available online. In its half-year results, the pay-TV and broadband business said it will launch Sky without a satellite dish and stream all its channels and on-demand content over IP. "This is a major development …
As an aside, isn't the comment about this being the death of the satellite dish wrong? I don't think Sky are saying that, they just say that they can reach other potential customers if they have an IP service.
It may be that Sky customers ill move away from satellite dish usage but that's not what Sky appear to be saying.
There's some stuff that they show where the only alternative in the UK is to pirate it (eg, Game Of Thrones).
And of course, given the choice between paying Murdoch and piracy, the choice is clear.
Obviously I take the legal option, wait, why are you all laughing?
UK is already taking steps in this direction ... The main aim of pumping Government money into 'high speed broadband' is not to benefit customers but to allow broadcasters to avoid their expensive broadcast transmission costs, making the punters pay for it by moving the infrastructure cost of transmission from the push service of the broadcaster to a 'pull service' by the punter hidden under the carpet that is the cost of 'high speed broadband'. Then sell off that wireless space for 5/6/7g and a nice massage of the Government's balance sheet.
Before this can happen in the UK there needs to be 'super high speed broadband' available everywhere, with sufficient backbone capacity, to prevent subscribers leaving in their droves due to buffering video streams ... that'll be another 30 years then ...
allow broadcasters to avoid their expensive broadcast transmission costs, making the punters pay for it by moving the infrastructure cost of transmission from the push service of the broadcaster to a 'pull service' by the punter hidden under the carpet that is the cost of 'high speed broadband'.
Hate to break it to you, but punters pay for everything all the time anyway. Do you not think it makes sense to deliver everything over IP, or should we continue maintaining multiple distribution systems?
Could we better spend the (presumably) tens of millions currently being spent sending men up ladders to fix dishes to walls?
TCP/IP is not designed for broadcast TV, compared to normal broadcasting methods.
a) I said IP, not TCP/IP. The bloke lower down said UDP, also runs over IP. It seems to work just fine for most things we put over it so far without being designed for it.
b) I very much doubt there will be much broadcast going on. Quite a lot of streaming, no broadcast.
Also you can save on expensive geosync satellites, their channels, and everything needed to upload the signal to them. You'll still need to provide enough storage and bandwidth to deliver on-demand contents to users. While without a good broadband deployment many users would be cut off. Maybe Italy is one of the first because FTTH rollout is going on quckly, and most of the country should be cabled by 2020.
Anyway, the name "Sky" is no longer a good one.... you'll get the signal in the basement, not on the roof <G>
So Italy - as with the hype for South Korea, Japan etc - why are these countries Internet rankings not far-far better??
https://www.cable.co.uk/broadband/speed/worldwide-speed-league/
Italy is 13 places below the UK and 16 below Ireland in Global Broadband rankings. The much vanities Spain FTTH only has an average of 36 Mbit/s.
If Sky/Xomcast wanted an existing territory to test ‘dishless Sky Q over the Internet’Ireland and the UK seen the most promising.
You raise an interesting point. Obviously Sky TV are going to stick their streaming servers next to their Sky ISP endpoints so they have great connectivity.
If that means that (eg) BT don't have such a good route to the TV, who should pay? Should Sky TV pay for better connectivity to their customers on BT? Or should BT pay so that their customers have better access to Sky TV?
After all, the customers are already paying both companies, Sky for their TV, and BT for their internet.
What ( I think ) would be cool would be for TV manufacturers to do a deal with Sky and add Sky as a dummy source ( with the Sky Q EPG, a minimum processor/ram speed, big disks for recording ). Although there's no reason they couldn't do that already if they licensed Sky's card standard.
Doing away with STB's would be nice. Although I do like my Sky Q remote control *.
Sky moves the cost of manufacture to the end customer and gives the user an incentive to not switch to Virgin/BT, customer doesn't have to find somewhere to hide the ugly STB and wires, TV manufacturer gains a selling point.
* Why are most TV remotes still so awful in 2017?
TV remotes are mostly awful because most people buy the cheapest tellies - because it's mostly a commodity market and so most players don't make very much profit. So they don't invest anything in getting their software right, or making their hardware ergonimic.
Sky are very profitable and decided to make their boxes mostly nice to use.
What ( I think ) would be cool would be for TV manufacturers to do a deal with Sky and add Sky as a dummy source ( with the Sky Q EPG, a minimum processor/ram speed, big disks for recording ). Although there's no reason they couldn't do that already if they licensed Sky's card standard.
You can blame sky for this. What should've happened is you should just be able to buy a CAM from sky and use whatever receiver took your fancy. (The CAM is a module that the card goes in, it handles the decryption) If you have a satellite enabled TV that's what the big hole in it is for. This would have allowed a separate market for Satellite/DVR boxes from the content they're used to consume.
However, sky had good lawyers and managed to get round this requirement. (I heard a (probably apocryphal) tale that the regulations require they sell a CAM module, so they did, just the one; once).
If it weren't for corporate greed then we'd maybe have managed to decouple the provider of the shows from the provider of the equipment, however that never really happened, in fact Sky ended up integrating even more, they now control the entire hardware production chain.
This is why their subscriber base can decline year on year but their profits not. It's only now that the likes of Netflix are providing some decent competition this is starting to change.
Personally, I would've subscribed to Sky years ago if they'd allow this as I use a PC for my TV PVR functionality, and would happily have subscribed if I could've used Myth or TvHeadend rather than Sky+ for my recording needs.
It's no different now. Just tech that changes, not people.
My IPTV comes from a bloke on the internet, costs 40 english pounds per annum and works flawlessly.
We* used to only be a few people, but then our wives/friends/colleagues who saw it or heard it mentioned realised that we get (insert content they want and pay for) *as well as* the football.
My tivo box hasn't been plugged in for months. All comes down the via the net.
*we being mainly football fans who stopped paying sky 100 quid a month.
One slight problem for the consumer is that with a dish, things are relatively easy to troubleshoot for the engineer who will come round (dish, LNB, cable, STB). However if it's all over broadband then there's bound to be the usual (ISPesque) fobbing off that the problem is almost definatley not with Sky, but elsewhere. So in the worst case you'll have to juggle both Sky and your ISP to sort things out. On an equally bad case then Sky may be your ISP. And then throw in the entire BT/OpenReach thing that the ISP should be doing.
I'm sure it'll be mainly fine when it's all running, but wouldn't like to be around when something goes wrong.
Although I hate to say anything good about BT, whenever I've needed an OpenReach engineer to come out they've been first class.
BT the company can be awful but the BT engineers I've had have always been excellent. One time my landline went kaput late on Friday afternoon and BT's response was "it's a domestic line and we only work on those Monday to Friday, so Monday at the earliest, maybe Tuesday depending". 10:30 Saturday morning the door bell goes and it's a BT engineer saying "I was in the area, so I thought I'd come and fix it now". 15 minutes later and I had a working landline again.
Would be nice not getting drop out in thunderstorms and not having fugly dishes on the sides of houses tbh but this is a very well executed, cunning move ( net neutrality ends -> Murdochs sell most of 21st C Fox ->Murdochs focus on being an ISP and content provider -> all ur IPs are belong to us ! )
Hopefully this will not be a wholesale replacement of satellite broadcasting?
When I recently lived in a rural area (only 3 mi from a major town) we didn't have much terrestrial reception, and on a good day our "broadband" could nearly reach 2Mb. Sky or freesat was the only option.
Now that we are within stone's throw of a major centre in Greater London our broadband frequently exceeds 2Mb - perhaps as high as 3Mb if the wind isn't blowing!
As much as I loath the Murdock empire I do like Game of Thrones...
"Satellite broadcasting is incredibly expensive..."
Satellite broadcasting is comparatively cheap in comparison to setting up ground based transmitters or cabling huge areas. That's how the business was actually able to operate and make profit. Remember Sky(1989) pre-dates ADSL(1998). Dishes aren't going anywhere in a hurry.
Satellite broadcasting is comparatively cheap in comparison to setting up ground based transmitters or cabling huge areas.
Satellite broadcasting is cheap compared to sending a VHS copy of every show to every house too! Look, I can make meaningless comparisons too!
Sky are competing with OTT providers, so comparing their costs against a broadcaster installing ground based transmitters or cabling areas is nonsense. Compare their costs of running satellite broadcast TV vs Netflix's costs of ensuring enough AWS nodes are active.
How many customers does Sky have? I saw some math recently for Directv, which has 20 million plus subscribers in the US. If you assume a 20 year satellite life, costing $400 million each, they need a fleet of five long term. That means they need to launch one every four years on average, costing $100 million per year. That's $5/year per subscriber, or less than 50 cents a month.. That's less than 1% of the average bill.
Streaming to 20 million subscribers sure as hell wouldn't be free, and might even cost them more...
Even if half their customers eventually decide they want to stream instead, it is still under a buck a month. Satellite is cheap, it won't be going anywhere.
What does this mean for the TV licence? At the moment, you only need one if you're watching 'Live broadcast' or 'live, catch-up or on demand' via iPlayer - no mention of other viewers.
If all TV, including news, is via a non-iPlayer on-demand service .... no licence required? Or more likely, they change the law, with the prospect of scooping up people who are currently exempt?
It will still need a license if you are watching broadcast TV via the internet.
There is a definition of what broadcast TV means knocking around, but I can't be arsed to dig it out. It's something to do with watching it (however you do it) while the same content is being transmitted on a broadcast medium, and covers all broadcast types.
This is different from on-demand, where you request specific content independently of whether it is being sent to other users.
Delays are already covered in the licensing - primarily because of those units that can "pause live tv".
http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check-if-you-need-one/topics/Live-TV-and-how-you-watch-it
No. Just about anything "can receive" BBC broadcasts.
The law applies to any live (live as in "pre-scheduled" as opposed to on-demand) TV broadcast. It was also modified about a year ago to include any non-S4C video i-player content.
So, anything that is available on 'normal tv' needs a license, however you're getting it.
i-player needs a license (unless you only use it for radio or S4C). itv player, channel 4 on demand and 5 on demand don't need a license (unless you watch their "live channels" through them)
Youtube videos don't need a license, however 'live programming' from youtube does - i.e. you need a license even if your only video viewing is cnn live via youtube, or some australian tv via a live internet feed)
The rules apply to both watching and recording.
Corrections to the above.
"If you can receive BBC content, live or not, you need a licence" Nope!
"If you are receiving broadcast", only if you are *watching* or *recording* live broadcasts, on PC (mobile etc included) or TV. They also added all content on iPlayer, as you said, including iPlayer catchup to this requirement.
But the licence only applies to other on demand services if they use live broadcast. Such as watching ITV/Channel 4/5 live broadcast on a PC etc. However if you are using catchup on those services you do not need a licence. Interestingly, and IMO untested, is if these "can" receive live broadcast they seem to be included even if they are not being used. :(
http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check-if-you-need-one/topics/Live-TV-and-how-you-watch-it
(As a note it mentions "Live TV" or "Live TV online", so services such as Twitch and Youtube streaming do not require a TV Licence as long as it is not TV broadcast they are streaming. So games/origional content is fine)
"What does this mean for the TV licence? At the moment, you only need one if you're watching 'Live broadcast' or 'live, catch-up or on demand' via iPlayer - no mention of other viewers."
There's no mention in either the article or the press release indicating that Sky have plans to go all Netflix and convert to on-demand only. It's just an increase in channels on their IP delivery network. Apart from which, Sky don't own all the channels broadcast over the Sky network.
This is old news I think they announced they were looking at this last year or maybe 2016. Its good news to all the people who live somewhere with no LOS. Mate of mine loves his football and had sky in the pre-digital age then when it went digital and moved to a different sat in a different position in the sky he couldn't get an LOS! Well pissed off!
We don't have the internet infrastructure for this and I'm not sure when we will if I'm honest. Anybody in a rural location or place where there isn't capacity are not going to get it.
1280 x 720 — 720p, recommended bitrate = 5 Mbps
1920 x 1080 — 1080p, recommended bitrate = 8 Mbps
3840 x 2160 — 4K, recommended bitrate = 25 Mbps
and that's just a single channel, when you add in extra boxes or programs being recorded that goes right up. Furthermore that's also if nobody else in the house is using the internet for consoles and the like.
Guestimate minimum connection speed would be 30mbps.
SkyQ already uses an internet connection for lots, its pretty seamless we watch probably more stuff download than we do live, you just wait a few seconds for it to download enough of the program to be watchable. And 4K UHD content is ONLY available by download its no via the dish.
We've got a 80Mb connection getting in the mid-high 70's most of the time
The bitrate is the same. Just the degree of compression of the content which differs.
lolwut? The degree of compression changes but the bitrate is the same?
The bitrates correspond to a level of quality that is considered broadcast. HEVC requires lower bitrates to achieve the equivalent quality.
We used to use MPEG-2 for HD, do you think the bitrates for that are the same as the H264 streams?
The way this is announced is though the satellite broadcasts will be switched off in the next 12 months. There are still a lot of areas of the country that don't have fast enough internet to make IPTV practical, especially if you have other people in the house using the internet for other things so satellite will be around for at least another decade yet.
What it doesn't mention in this article is the new EU rules on geo-blocking are due this year which will mean that broadcaster are no longer able to restrict the content to only show in specific countries. So you will legally be able to buy a UK Sky subscription from any EU country, so having it all available on IPTV gives Sky a vast new market to sell to. But on the reverse it also means other pay TV operators can start to sell their service to UK customers from the EU meaning you could get sporting events cheaper than Sky by using an EU pay TV provider.
That depend on the Brexit agreement, I'm afraid. Probably geoblocking will be illegal inside the EU, and maybe EFTA - but as soon UK is out, if no agreement is in force, it could be free to geoblock what it likes, and vice-versa.
I wonder if Sky will only supply this over Sky Broadband? It's entirely possible I guess. Especially if they're hauling multicast over the network too. No Sky broadband, no IPTV.
As for the other way to geoblock - just use a satellite with a tight footprint on the UK, e.g. Astra 2E.
"The way this is announced is though the satellite broadcasts will be switched off in the next 12 months."
No. Sky are introducing their subscription service over IP, and the UK won't be getting it till end 2018/early 2019 - so obviously they aren't switching off satellite broadcasts in the next 12 months. Nothing in their press release refers to satellite broadcasting whatsoever, so you can easily assume that this is IN ADDITION for those who want it over IP instead of a dish.
Whilst everyone is talking about the pros and cons of TV via broadband, my idle geek mind is thinking about the other end of the IP/TV pipe. How do they stream all that live TV via IP. Are they using Multicast in the core and converting to unicast near the edge? Or something else? Those millions of customers (even if they're not all watching live TV at once) soon adds up to a lot of bandwidth.
(I suppose the question is similar to other services such as Youtube Live, etc)
Any thoughts on what will be the broadband speed requirements ? Supposedly the push is on for “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) to 98% of premises in the United Kingdom by around 2020." Mmmm, not with BT involved !
My understanding is that streaming 4k Ultra requires a minimum of 15-20 Mbps (that's 'spare' over what is being used for other things). 25Mbps is recommended - that's 1Mbps above the superfast definition.
Sky says - "Sky Q lets you record six shows at the same time while you are watching a seventh, so you no longer have to worry about clashes."
Ok, at the moment not all streams will be 4k Ultra, but what sort of bandwidth will be required to use this Sky Q function. Oh, I live almost half-a-mile from a town - no scheduled date for upgrading our broadband which is currently 5.5 Mbps (on a good day) and further down the lane they get 2Mbps !!
O, joy ... another way to go through Sky's menu and realise, after scrolling through several hundred channels twice, that there isn't a single thing worth watching. The sheer avalanche of cretinous shit is dumbfounding. Who are they, those people who actually want to watch endless reruns of crappy, breathless narrations as some poor schmuck gets stopped bringing an illegal boglogorian fruit through Australian customs? Or Season-57-Episode-94 of My Cheating Fat Loser Model Bakeoff Confession Wedding? Or the 21,032th repeat of a 1950s movie that shouldn't have been made, let alone watched even once?
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