Sky Q launched

Well finally the wait is over. Sky today have released details of their new Sky Q box. We always new Sky would have something good up their sleeve and they havn't disappointed us. This new set top box looks quite something with a whopping 12 tuners means you can record up to four channels simultaneously, while still watching a fifth channel live. So never again have you not enough space and the fact that it can be streamed round the house using your own electricity wires to up to two other Sky Q mini boxes keeping everybody happy in the home. The fact that Sky use satellite unlike BT who use your broadband to stream 4K makes it open to anyone in the UK and Ireland no matter how remote you are.

The system is based on the notion of 'fluid viewing', so that customers can watch programmes across a number of screens - for example, pausing a show in one room, then watching it in another.

Customers will also be able to download programmes to their tablet, to watch on the go and you won't need to be online or have WiFi.

Interactive apps including YouTube and Vevo will also be available through the system. As well as a YouTube app, Sky Q will let you play music through your TV. Apple's AirPlay and Spotify will both be supported.

With Sky Q, Sky has given its TV interface a sorely needed lick of paint. Alongside a fully fledged TV guide, programming is organised into tabs such as Catch Up TV, Top Picks and Box Sets. Meanwhile a new Continue tab collects programmes that you're halfway through, to quickly get back into your shows.

On 18/11/2015 19:56, sintv wrote:
Well finally the wait is over. Sky today have released details of their new Sky Q box. We always new Sky would have something good up their sleeve and they havn't disappointed us. This new set top box looks quite something with a whopping 12 tuners means you can record up to four channels simultaneously, while still watching a fifth channel live. So never again have you not enough space and the fact that it can be streamed round the house using your own electricity wires to up to two other Sky Q mini boxes keeping everybody happy in the home. The fact that Sky use satellite unlike BT who use your broadband to stream 4K makes it open to anyone in the UK and Ireland no matter how remote you are.

The system is based on the notion of 'fluid viewing', so that customers can watch programmes across a number of screens - for example, pausing a show in one room, then watching it in another.

Customers will also be able to download programmes to their tablet, to watch on the go and you won't need to be online or have WiFi.

Interactive apps including YouTube and Vevo will also be available through the system. As well as a YouTube app, Sky Q will let you play music through your TV. Apple's AirPlay and Spotify will both be supported.

With Sky Q, Sky has given its TV interface a sorely needed lick of paint. Alongside a fully fledged TV guide, programming is organised into tabs such as Catch Up TV, Top Picks and Box Sets. Meanwhile a new Continue tab collects programmes that you're halfway through, to quickly get back into your shows.


It got boring when Freeview started filling up channel space with hour
after hour repeats which were then repeated the next day.

It's all very well having sooper dooper definition but all there is to
watch is crap crap and more crap.

On 18/11/2015 19:56, sintv wrote:
This new set top box looks quite something with a whopping 12 tuners
means you can record up to four channels simultaneously, while still
watching a fifth channel live.

Why do you need 12 tuners? Worst case you only need 5 tuners to record 4
and watch 1.

With my box I can record 6+ channels simultaneously whilst watching a
7th (live or recorded)



--
mailto: news {at} admac {dot] myzen {dot} co {dot} uk

On Wed, 18 Nov 2015 20:09:37 +0000, alan_m wrote:

With my box I can record 6+ channels simultaneously whilst watching a
7th (live or recorded)

With my MediaPortal/Argus set up I once got 32 channels recording at once
across 4 tuners. It was purely a stress test but it coped just fine.

On 18/11/2015 20:54, ureds wrote:
On Wed, 18 Nov 2015 20:09:37 +0000, alan_m wrote:

With my box I can record 6+ channels simultaneously whilst watching a
7th (live or recorded)

With my MediaPortal/Argus set up I once got 32 channels recording at once
across 4 tuners. It was purely a stress test but it coped just fine.


The 6+ is conservative, my box will record more at the same time (4 tuners).

Half a decade ago a Topfield PVR could record a complete Freeview MUX at
a time.

--
mailto: news {at} admac {dot] myzen {dot} co {dot} uk

On Wed, 18 Nov 2015 22:00:37 +0000, alan_m
wrote:

On 18/11/2015 20:54, ureds wrote:
On Wed, 18 Nov 2015 20:09:37 +0000, alan_m wrote:

With my box I can record 6+ channels simultaneously whilst watching a
7th (live or recorded)

With my MediaPortal/Argus set up I once got 32 channels recording at once
across 4 tuners. It was purely a stress test but it coped just fine.


The 6+ is conservative, my box will record more at the same time (4 tuners).

Half a decade ago a Topfield PVR could record a complete Freeview MUX at
a time.

That presumaby used just one tuner.


--
Peter Duncanson
(in uk.tech.digital-tv)

On Wed, 18 Nov 2015 22:53:20 +0000, Peter Duncanson wrote:

On Wed, 18 Nov 2015 22:00:37 +0000, alan_m
wrote:

On 18/11/2015 20:54, ureds wrote:
On Wed, 18 Nov 2015 20:09:37 +0000, alan_m wrote:

With my box I can record 6+ channels simultaneously whilst watching a
7th (live or recorded)

With my MediaPortal/Argus set up I once got 32 channels recording at
once across 4 tuners. It was purely a stress test but it coped just
fine.


The 6+ is conservative, my box will record more at the same time (4
tuners).

Half a decade ago a Topfield PVR could record a complete Freeview MUX at
a time.

That, presumably, used just one tuner.

Presumably, using a TAP and generating almost 11GB per hour's worth of
recording time in a single file which would need a playback TAP (possibly
just a feature of the whole MUX recording TAP) to let you 'tune' into
whichever TV channel you wished to play back (or record) from the mux
file.

It's a nice idea (I wasn't aware that anyone had written such a TAP) but
it would burn up a lot of storage space. You're unlikely to be interested
in keeping more than a fraction as archived programmes, particularly
true, I'd have thought, in the case of the commercial muxes. Even the BBC
SD mux may only peak at two or three TV channels worth from which to
select 'programmes of interest' deemed worthy of viewing or archiving to
long term storage.

Presumably any such post editing activity (such as splitting off TV
streams into individually topped and tailed files will be done on the PVR
itself, courtesy of another TAP (or possibly as yet another feature of
the whole mux recording TAP).

The alternative of transferring the file to a PC, even using the turbo
mode, will be a serious bottleneck (15 minutes or more just to transfer a
one hour BBC1 or BBC2 or BBC4 programme over the USB interface - probably
taking a full hour or more simply to transfer that 11GB whole mux file if
you want to offload any such editing onto a PC.

Whole mux recording is quite doable on a modern PC these days and is a
neat way to create your own personal +1 or even +24 hour service on each
selected mux (11GB and 260GB circular buffer files in the case of UK DVB-
T (SD only) muxes - with DVB-T2 UK muxes requiring some 18GB and 430GB's
worth of disk buffer space). A 2TB HDD will support up to 6 DVB-T +24
buffer files or a maximum of 4 DVB-T2 +24 buffer files.

2TB HDDs aren't considered the giant capacity drives they once were some
5 or 6 years ago. In fact the 'sweet spot' price point is somewhere
between the 3 and the 5TB mark right now, with even the largest reliable
drives at the 6TB mark now costing only a few quid more than a pair of
3TB units.

You can forget about Seagate drives (especially their heavily discounted
8TB archiving monster with its rather questionable 'shingled' storage
technology) unless you like asking for trouble.

If you're a real TV addict, the technology is available for you to build
your own PC based PVR, complete with personal +1 or +24 buffers (or any
hours of plusness in between - or even beyond if you can afford the disk
space or manage with a smaller selection of muxes).

I've considered this idea with the BBC SD mux I currently record from
but the biggest turn off is having to hive off the required programmes
from, in my case, a 260GB circular buffer file. The PC I'm using isn't a
dedicated box, it's my desktop PC where I can keep an eye on what
Kaffeine is up to.

Whilst this would neatly sabotage the BBC scheduler's own efforts at
sabotaging my recording schedules, the latest such example being their
obsession with the recent Paris terrorist attacks in extending the news
by another 20 minutes which totally screwed my scheduled recording of
HIGABMN4U (the extended version of HIGN4U).

It's as if the BBC1 programme schedulers live in total ignorance of the
BBC News (24) service provided by their employer. Now I've yet another
reason to hate ISIS.

I think a better way to immunise my schedule against BBC1&2 scheduling
****tery is simply to record all of each evening's programmes back to
back during the vulnerable periods and make use of the overlapping
padding to let me stitch any programmes back together again should they
be so afflicted. It's easy enough to discard the surplus recordings once
I've verified that the desired ones haven't been hit by this scheduling
****tery.

Whilst this results in burning up more storage space than I'm currently
consuming with my selective scheduling policy, it will be but a fraction
of a whole mux 24 hour buffer file's worth. It's true that I'll have a
shedload more files to check out but it's easy enough to cull the
unwanted recordings to thin it back down to my current usage level.

Whole mux recordings are, as I've already said, a nice idea but you
really need a dedicated PC with something like an enhanced version of
MythTV installed to do it justice. Using a Toppy to record a whole mux
would be rather limiting imo. As useful as this may be to make BBC
programmes truly "unmissable" (fsvo "unmissable"), I can't see it
providing much more benefit beyond that specific usage case.

--
Johnny B Good

Oh no, not over the mains please. That is the end of am radio as we know it
anywhere near a user of the boxes.
Also have they now inbuilt their sky talker add on for the blind so we can
use their boxes without sighted help?
Brian

--
From the Sofa of Brian Gaff Reply address is active
Remember, if you don't like where I post
or what I say, you don't have to
read my posts! :-)
"sintv" wrote in message
...
Well finally the wait is over. Sky today have released details of their new
Sky Q box. We always new Sky would have something good up their sleeve and
they havn't disappointed us. This new set top box looks quite something
with a whopping 12 tuners means you can record up to four channels
simultaneously, while still watching a fifth channel live. So never again
have you not enough space and the fact that it can be streamed round the
house using your own electricity wires to up to two other Sky Q mini boxes
keeping everybody happy in the home. The fact that Sky use satellite unlike
BT who use your broadband to stream 4K makes it open to anyone in the UK and
Ireland no matter how remote you are.

The system is based on the notion of 'fluid viewing', so that customers can
watch programmes across a number of screens - for example, pausing a show in
one room, then watching it in another.

Customers will also be able to download programmes to their tablet, to watch
on the go and you won't need to be online or have WiFi.

Interactive apps including YouTube and Vevo will also be available through
the system. As well as a YouTube app, Sky Q will let you play music through
your TV. Apple's AirPlay and Spotify will both be supported.

With Sky Q, Sky has given its TV interface a sorely needed lick of paint.
Alongside a fully fledged TV guide, programming is organised into tabs such
as Catch Up TV, Top Picks and Box Sets. Meanwhile a new Continue tab
collects programmes that you're halfway through, to quickly get back into
your shows.

In article ,
sintv wrote:
[spam deleted]

Do Sky pay you for this?

(Search for any of the odd-sounding phrases from that article and
you'll find dozens of copies all over the clickbait "news" sites.)

-- Richard

On Thu, 19 Nov 2015 12:53:18 +0000, Richard Tobin wrote:

In article ,
sintv wrote:
[spam deleted]

Do Sky pay you for this?

(Search for any of the odd-sounding phrases from that article and you'll
find dozens of copies all over the clickbait "news" sites.)


Thank you, Richard. I was beginning to wonder whether the "Penny would
drop" regarding this spam posting. :-) They can be a little slow witted
sometimes in this NG.


--
Johnny B Good