Sky Italia...promoting Sky UK Boxes

On Sat, 4 Oct 2003 20:05:54 +0100, Paul Duffy paul at scim dot co dot
uk wrote:

I was watching the Man U game today on Sky Italia and was stunned when I
saw a promo for the UK Sky box (but with Italian on the remote control)
as I don't speak Italian I couldn't understand what the promo was
saying.

Interesting. The last time I waved my dish at Hotbird the lady on the
Sky Assist channel was busy showing off stuff about how to set your
PIN, etc, but the menus looked pretty naff. No pictures of the box or
remote at that time.

Have Sky already decided to move all the Sky Italia platform to
Videoguard? Are they giving boxes away in Italy?

Not sure - again, last time I looked, which was around about the end
of August, the most I could make out with my non-existent Italian was
that a smiley man would come to your house with his van and some
ladders, and get you all Skyed up for 89 euros.

I recall speculation of a move to Videoguard for ages and ages ever
since the purchase of Stream. Not much point in using something that's
hopelessly hacked. (Is that how you were able to watch the game? It
wasn't FTA, was it?)

Probably makes a lot of sense to use UK digiboxes (or ones very like
them) - saves money on designing and building new ones. (Actually I
think the term "re-inventing the wheel" was designed for such an
occasion.)

Anyone know anything about this as if it's correct it's now a dead cert
that they'll do the same in the States.

DirecTV in the states already uses custom recievers and is
all-Videoguard throughout, though, isn't it?

On Sat, 04 Oct 2003 22:55:49 GMT, (Ant)
wrote:

Interesting. The last time I waved my dish at Hotbird the lady on the
Sky Assist channel was busy showing off stuff about how to set your
PIN, etc, but the menus looked pretty naff. No pictures of the box or
remote at that time.

Actually I looked again last night and discovered that there seem to
be two Sky Assist channels - one shows the menus from what I presume
is a Stream box, the other shows the menus from a Tele + box.

Also came across a small advert which showed lots of TV screens being
replaced by fuzz, with channel numbers and phone numbers for people to
use depending on whether they were a Tele+ viewer or a Stream viewer.
Presumably this is something to do with it.