[Tezcatlipoca]

Nope, you specifically need Sky Broadband.

From the DS story linked earlier:

Originally Posted by Digital Spy

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However, a big issue about Anytime+ is that it will initially only be made available to Sky customers with a Sky Broadband connection, meaning anyone on another internet service provider will miss out. Downward said that the reasoning behind this strategy is to enable the "optimum experience" for customers and make it easier to manage technical issues.

"If you imagine if something was to go wrong with the experience, then we would be able to diagnose it at a box level and a network level, and resolve the problem for the customers," she said. "If they were on another ISP, then we would be able to diagnose some of the problem but we would have to hand that customer off to another ISP to sort out the network issues. Until we can be confident that we can deliver a really great end-to-end customer experience, we want to just keep it on the Sky Broadband network."

Among internet service providers, there is an ongoing battle for 'triple play' customers taking a combined package of broadband, TV and landline. Restricting Anytime+ to Sky Broadband subscribers could therefore be viewed as a commercial ploy from Sky.

However, Downward claimed that it is actually about launching a quality service over broadband which Sky can control end-to-end. She also indicated that Sky intends to roll out the service to other ISPs in the future, but that will only occur once the firm is "confident that it will bring the right level of customer experience".

When Sky Player launched on Xbox Live last year, the service was beset with technical problems, due in part to an unexpected level of demand. Sky senior product development manager David Kelly said that one of the main benefits of retaining Anytime+ within Sky Broadband is the ability to optimise the network capacity to ensure that the service is deliverable without issue.

"We have optimised our network so that this service is the best it can be, but another ISP might shape the traffic at primetime, which could mean that content takes longer to stream," said Kelly. "We just want to be able to manage the service before we widen it to other networks. Within our own broadband network, we are more than confident that we can deliver without crashes and so on. We have planned against any major bottle necks on the launch day and we have learnt from past rollouts, so we are very confident that we won't have any major problems."

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