[mdean]

Originally Posted by themelon

There is an argument, why should you be tied to Sky? Especially if you consider the service you are getting to be poor..........believe it or not there are many people who think the service they get from Sky is poor....You get a £200 box and recieve a crap service you are stuck with it, even if you wanted to move to cable or even DTT your Sky+ PVR would be an expensive door stop. Better to get a better product like TiVO and you can use that on any platform Cable, Satellite or DTT.......Of course TiVo naturally failed in the UK, Sky was put in charge of Advertising!! knowing its own product was around the corner it decided to forget about marketing for a while, and save its money for a product which locks users into its own service....exactly what they want. There is no choice thats a bad thing, Skys anti competative dealings and breaking of rules has meant practically all competition has been erased, and they can more or less do what they want.

Lets not forget that Sky have had a massive head start on developing Interactive content. Mainly because they decided to break the original conditions of a Satellite Broadcast licence.

Many years ago I was originally a BSB Subscriber. BSB won the first ever Satellite Multi Channel licence in the UK, the conditions for such a Licence were that broadcasts should be in the superior DMAC Standard, and the broadcasters should use their own Satellites.

The Sky came along, got a licence and some how ignored and got away with ignoring government conditions for a licence, BSB who spent vast amounts of money on their own Satellites and DMAC decoders were in financial trouble.....Along come Sky do away with BSBs superior service and sell off the Satellites within two years.

The Cable companies also fell foul to a bad government idea, franchising, Instead of one national company running the fibre network they had 12 or more small companies running local franchises, these small companies had little capital to start with....spent what the had on networks using low budget components. The companies fell into debt were brough out by bigger companies who took on even larger amounts of debt which has crippled them for many years. Only now slowly but surely they are beginning to sort things out. Ok ntl may have some idiots at the top but most big comapnies do, BT, Sky, British Gas etc.

So essentially Sky is a parasite who rents third part satellite space and uses a third party (ntl:broadcasting) for their uplinks.

Totally correct -but the "Oh sky+ is lovely brigade" do not want to hear