Cost for HD sky plus

Apologies if this has been asked before.....I'm a subscriber with film and
sport package
I want to upgrade to Sky + and HD .when it arrives... So I'm going to wait
till its all in position ( next spring? ).has anyone any ideas what costs
are going to be??

Barry

"bs" wrote in message ...
Apologies if this has been asked before.....I'm a subscriber with film and sport package
I want to upgrade to Sky + and HD .when it arrives... So I'm going to wait till its all in position ( next
spring? ).has anyone any ideas what costs are going to be??

Barry







Rumours and speculation only for both the cost of the hardware and the cost
of the additional content.
Put aside £500 as an initial price and another £100 for the first years sub and
I don't think you will be far off.

Just like SKY+ there will be huge savings the longer you wait and for many
the allure of HD is worth waiting for at those prices

There are a few FTA receivers appearing on the market which may be a viable
option IF the BBC offer some decent HD next year but they ain't cheap either.
Then again just like with normal satellite there will be CAMS galore for other
EU services from the likes of Premiere.


Mike C

Mike_C wrote:

Put aside £500 as an initial price and another £100 for the first years sub

Whilst I'm sure that Sky will charge a double premium for the sub on
an HD service I doubt that the receivers will cost that much. Indeed
there is no real reason why they should cost much more than regular
Sky+ units. They are basically the same thing but with high resolution
MPEG4 chips rather than lower resolution MPEG2 chips, and couple of
extra outputs.

--
Digibox problem? : A reboot solves 90% of these.
The Sky Digital FAQ: http://tinyurl.com/7rm2m
UK TV overseas: http://tinyurl.com/6p73
BBC reception questions? ; http://www.astra2d.com/
Fed up with on-screen logos? : http://logofreetv.org/
----
Only the truth as I see it.
No monies return'd. ;-)

"Jomtien" wrote in message ...
Mike_C wrote:

Put aside £500 as an initial price and another £100 for the first years sub

Whilst I'm sure that Sky will charge a double premium for the sub on
an HD service I doubt that the receivers will cost that much. Indeed
there is no real reason why they should cost much more than regular
Sky+ units. They are basically the same thing but with high resolution
MPEG4 chips rather than lower resolution MPEG2 chips, and couple of
extra outputs.




Regular SKY+ units have had already R&D costs recouped and are
benefiting from mass production from at least three companies.
SKY+ HD components will be significantly higher priced simply down
to low production volumes even with mpeg4 based units being used
for French and German services.

You only have to look at the price for retail mpeg HD receivers which
have nothing to do with SKY to get an idea of the true market price.
The brand new PACE mpeg4 FTA HD receiver which has a single
tuner and no hard drive recording is £360 retail.

A SKY+ HD costing £400 from SKY would to me look reasonably priced.



Mike C

Mike_C wrote:
"Jomtien" wrote in message ...

Mike_C wrote:


Put aside £500 as an initial price and another £100 for the first years sub

Whilst I'm sure that Sky will charge a double premium for the sub on
an HD service I doubt that the receivers will cost that much. Indeed
there is no real reason why they should cost much more than regular
Sky+ units. They are basically the same thing but with high resolution
MPEG4 chips rather than lower resolution MPEG2 chips, and couple of
extra outputs.





Regular SKY+ units have had already R&D costs recouped and are
benefiting from mass production from at least three companies.
SKY+ HD components will be significantly higher priced simply down
to low production volumes even with mpeg4 based units being used
for French and German services.

You only have to look at the price for retail mpeg HD receivers which
have nothing to do with SKY to get an idea of the true market price.
The brand new PACE mpeg4 FTA HD receiver which has a single
tuner and no hard drive recording is £360 retail.

A SKY+ HD costing £400 from SKY would to me look reasonably priced.



Mike C


Read somewhere that HD takes up more space on your Hard Disk. One
advertised 160GB digital recorder boasted 13 hours of HD picture
quality. So to get today's average of say 50 hours recording time, will
we need to purchase a 600Gb disk? Is this feasible?
Tom

"Jomtien" wrote in message
...
Mike_C wrote:

Put aside £500 as an initial price and another £100 for the first years
sub

Whilst I'm sure that Sky will charge a double premium for the sub on
an HD service I doubt that the receivers will cost that much. Indeed
there is no real reason why they should cost much more than regular
Sky+ units. They are basically the same thing but with high resolution
MPEG4 chips rather than lower resolution MPEG2 chips, and couple of
extra outputs.

--
Digibox problem? : A reboot solves 90% of these.
The Sky Digital FAQ: http://tinyurl.com/7rm2m
UK TV overseas: http://tinyurl.com/6p73
BBC reception questions? ; http://www.astra2d.com/
Fed up with on-screen logos? : http://logofreetv.org/
----
Only the truth as I see it.
No monies return'd. ;-)

Exactly. Current HD receivers are selling at a premium because manafacturers
/ retailers can get away with it.

Manafacturers are well versed in producing digital MPEG2 receivers. Changing
those designs to support MPEG4 as well isn't a big deal.

Andy.

"Tom" [email protected] wrote in message ...
Mike_C wrote:



Read somewhere that HD takes up more space on your Hard Disk. One advertised 160GB digital recorder boasted 13 hours
of HD picture quality. So to get today's average of say 50 hours recording time, will we need to purchase a 600Gb
disk? Is this feasible?
Tom




HD video requires far more storage capacity than SD and I expect the
numbers you have seen refer to mpeg2 HD recordings.
Both SKY's and NTL's HD service (as well those expected from the BBC)
will be using mpeg4 compression and therefore while an hour of HD will still
be significantly larger than an hour of SD (maybe upto double) the difference
isn't that big to make a 160gig drive impractical.
Of course 250gig + should be the minimum spec based on gate prices and
the demands of the customers who see DVD/HD recorders incorporating
300gig+ drives.


Mike C

In article om,
Mike_C wrote:

"Jomtien" wrote in message
.. .
Mike_C wrote:

Put aside £500 as an initial price and another £100 for the first years sub

Whilst I'm sure that Sky will charge a double premium for the sub on
an HD service I doubt that the receivers will cost that much. Indeed
[...]
Regular SKY+ units have had already R&D costs recouped and are
benefiting from mass production from at least three companies.
SKY+ HD components will be significantly higher priced simply down
to low production volumes even with mpeg4 based units being used
for French and German services.
[...]
A SKY+ HD costing £400 from SKY would to me look reasonably priced.

No good reason at all.

A good comparison would be Dish Network in the States, which is moving
their service from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4, anticipating a price of under $100
for the STB. Admittedly, this is without hard disk, but even so, there
is no good reason why the box should cost more than £150 over here with
a reasonable hard disk.

In bulk, MPEG-4 decoder chips for H.264 that do everything from the raw
MPEG stream to HDMI outputs / DAC outputs for component can be had for
about $20.

Hard disk costs should not be significantly more expensive. The primary
reason Sky is going with MPEG-4 AVC over MPEG-2 is that it is far more
efficient. A good quality standard MPEG-2 stream is 10Mbit/s, which can
be knocked down to about 4.5Mbit/s for a quality acceptable for regular
TV use but that looks awful on a big screen. In the States, regular HDTV
programming uses 19.3Mbit/s, which still causes osme macroblocking, a
DVHS tape will use about 45Mbit/s and look perfect, some stations squash
it down to about 10Mbit/s which looks OK unless there's a lot of
panning. You can expect an H.264 stream to use about half the bandwidth
of an MPEG-2 stream for the same kind of quality, so the actual
bandwidth will be about the same as the current standard broadcasts.

Ralf.
--
Ranulf Doswell | Please note this e-mail address
www.ranulf.net | expires one month after posting.

Mike_C wrote:

A SKY+ HD costing £400 from SKY would to me look reasonably priced.

My bet will be half that, or less.

--
Digibox problem? : A reboot solves 90% of these.
The Sky Digital FAQ: http://tinyurl.com/7rm2m
UK TV overseas: http://tinyurl.com/6p73
BBC reception questions? ; http://www.astra2d.com/
Fed up with on-screen logos? : http://logofreetv.org/
----
Only the truth as I see it.
No monies return'd. ;-)

x wrote:

Exactly. Current HD receivers are selling at a premium because manafacturers
/ retailers can get away with it.

Manafacturers are well versed in producing digital MPEG2 receivers. Changing
those designs to support MPEG4 as well isn't a big deal.

Not to mention that the new all-in-one MPEG4 chips are very cheap
indeed for what they do.

I remember when DVD burners first came out at many times the cost of
CD burners. Yet the innards are virtually identical and indeed they
now retail at nearly the same price.

--
Digibox problem? : A reboot solves 90% of these.
The Sky Digital FAQ: http://tinyurl.com/7rm2m
UK TV overseas: http://tinyurl.com/6p73
BBC reception questions? ; http://www.astra2d.com/
Fed up with on-screen logos? : http://logofreetv.org/
----
Only the truth as I see it.
No monies return'd. ;-)