Cancelling Sky

[OhWifey]

I'm in the process of cancelling Sky. The bit I will miss is the ability to pause and rewind live tv but also to record stuff. What do others do to replace these functions?

If it's a Sky plus box, did you know that you can ask them to keep your record etc functions? It then costs £10 a month, and you're not tied into a contract. Non Sky channels only of course. Not sure what happens with Sky Q.

Or you could get a Freeview recording box (signal through aerial) or a Freesat one (signal through your existing Sky dish). I think they cost about £300 but no ongoing monthly fees of course. You might need to pay someone to install it, depending how techy you are.

I was going to pay the £10 a month thing to Sky and continue to use my Sky plus box (be aware many Sky phone line staff seem unaware of this). But magically Sky suddenly found they could give me the normal package (Sky Signature?) for £14 a month! No films or sports of course. This was Spring 2020. It does mean that we're tied into an 18 month contract though. Might help you if you're cancelling for financial reasons.

Thanks that's really helpful. It's Sky Q and my cancellation email says the fee for not returning the box is £125 I think. I'm not sure whether it would retain functionality.
Cancelling for the daylight robbery!

Oh dear, yeah I think I heard that Sky remain the owners of Sky Q boxes. Unless you kept an old Sky plus box somewhere?

Otherwise your best options are a Freeview or Freesat box probably. Or give up recording and just stream? I have a Chromecast, it's quite cheap and I love it!

Or possibly you can still get a machine that records to discs? Don't know about that though.

Life used to be so much simpler with a basic TV combined with a video recorder!

I've done just this. I bought a freesat box £200 and you can record and rewind, even set recordings from the app. Has 170 channels I think. Best of all no monthly fees at all, its free

If you have sky Q you can just connect it and it works. You can record 3 channels while watching 1 other, took 5 mins to get it up and running

Sky send you a box to send you old box back, freepost as well

Don’t know why your cancelling but I recently cancelled as the cost went from £52 to £97 per month after my 18 month deal ended.

Got offered £20 off to stay but cancelled anyway. In my notice period I got a call offering me the same package for £45 per month for another 18 months. Yup I’m staying.

Btw that covers sky signature, sports, super fast broadband and landline (no calls).

The thing that really pissed me off when we cancelled our Sky subscription was that they then said they could reduce our bill to next to nothing (after paying 60 quid a month). We went ahead and cancelled anyway, only to lose all the movies we had paid for through Sky. Totally infuriating.

We cancelled recently (SkyQ). Ours had gone up to £106. They offered £65, DH said no. The day it ended we lost access to all but free channels, the ability to pause and rewind and all our recordings, catch-up etc. They sent an envelope to send it back in. DH decided to try one more haggle, called them again and its now £47, so we started back up and got all our recordings back. Still got sport, cinema, the only thing we've lost was kids channels which we didn't use anyway.

I’ve cancelled Sky bought a recording free view box which records, pauses, series links everything a Sky box would do. No costs once you’ve bought the box,

I used to be with bt and I could do all the pausing and recording stuff. In the end we got a smart tv so I just got rid of the big bill and we use Netflix/Disney etc it's a pain for things like itv player though cause you have to watch all the adds even if you fast forward

We cancel Sky regularly once a year or so. They then ring up and offer it reduced to retain us. It's a pantomime but the only way it remains affordable

Thanks all. Yes I'm hoping they'll call during the notice period because I can't really be bothered with all the faff of the switch. I sort of like the dance but I wish they'd just give me a proper price to begin with!