#“Save a few bob on Sky TV”
I know we are early adopters/geeks but I think what we are doing with media consumption is a reflection of what will happen in the mainstream in the next two years.
Like many people we have been long signed-up to some stupid rip-off Sky package involving movies, multi-room and Sky+. it was costing north of 75 a month. We have slowly come to the realisation that we consume more and more content via the web with a simultaneous collapse in "normal" TV watching. I'd be surprised if I watch more than 2 hours a month of Irish TV but I still watch plenty of time-delayed BBC1/BBC2/Channel4 via Sky+. We haven't watched any I/UTV channels in over two years. We've maybe watched one movie a month on SkyMovies and haven't done BoxOffice in years (mainly because I disconnected the phone line to the box) But I do love my US TV and look forward to Boxee some day signing global content deals with all the networks to distribute their programming on a PPV basis worldwide. Total disintermediation of the distributors and the TV stations who buy their content. I don't want my MTV, I want my IPTV. And I want it now. I want to see a list of House, Men of A Certain Age, Modern family etc etc etc on my Boxee box. Tick "Subscribe" beside each one and have them downloaded and paid-for within an hour of US TV broadcast. Hulu the way it should be. Except it's Boxee. In preparation for this, I just rang Sky and dumped everything except standard programming like BBC and the Kids package. So Kids + Multi-room (for the kids) + SkyHD for 54 a month. New hardware but less dosh out every month. Result. And if the HD channels turn out to be a waste of time, we'll drop that fee too. Rupert should start getting very very worried. One of these days he is going to wake up in Shady Pines with no-one paying for his newspapers' online content and only some die-hard sports subscribers on Sky.