A TV Revolution

So far my Sky TV experience has been absolutely brilliant. I called them to order TV on Tuesday and it was installed on Sunday. They could have installed it earlier, but that was the earliest I could manage. An extremly professional and helpful installer turned up at about 2:30pm, adjusted our dish a bit, installed our box, downloaded some updates and I was all set up to watch the last 10 minutes of the Manchester derby on Sky Sports and the whole of the Liverpool Chelsea game. The installer commented that he'd never seen a TV like ours before and asked where it had come from. I assured him it wasn't foreign, just really old, but I don't think he believed me. It still works fine though, we'll see how all your fancy plasmas and LCD screens are doing in 15 years time (yes, I'm jealous... wait until I have some money!).

The Sky+ box itself is an exceptional bit of kit. It's incredibly fast and easy to use. The 'pause live TV' feature that we all know from the Sky adverts is going to change the way I watch TV. Desperate to urinate? Need another beer? Pizza man arrived just as your team wins a penalty? Girlfriend urgently needs to talk about curtains in the middle of your favourite show? Just pause it and continue a few minutes later. Someone arrives late for the football? Pause the kick-off and fast forward catch up to live during the half time adverts.

I've tried to do some of this stuff on my PC, recording onto hard drive froma TV card, and it's slow and horrible. On the sky box it's so quick and silent you don't notice anything's happening. I can watch a show and record something else. I can record two things at once and watch a previously recorded program and tell it to automatically record an entire series at the touch of a button. I truly have moved from our antiquated old set-up into the 21st Century. A bit of further research also shows that I can pipe Sky all around the house using the existing RFF links, and even use one or more of these handy Sky Link gadgets to set it up so that the remotes will work in each room. Although we can't watch two things simultaneously in different rooms, unless we get more boxes.

So far, so good, Broadband is supposed to be active on Thursday 'but allow 3 days after that' so I'll let you know how that goes.