AIBU to ask you about Sky Q?

[crisscrosscranky]

I'm about to do my annual call to Sky to haggle our bill down. We currently have Sky+ HD plus 1 multi-room box, fibre broadband and line rental (but no talk package as don't really use landline for outgoing calls) and it's costing about £90 a month.

I know if I phone they are going to offer something to do with Sky Q and I have a couple of questions!

If you have Sky Q multiroom can you have unlimited mini boxes? We currently have Sky in our lounge and bedroom but we're having some work done and we'll have two functioning lounges plus would quite like to keep sky in the bedroom and possibly in DD's bedroom next year (she's 10).

Is it worth the extra money if you don't use it to watch on mobile devices? My friend swears by the Sky app for her son in restaurants but I'l admit to kids with tablets in restaurants being a pet hate!

TIA.

Following!

Im annoyed with Mine, it Keeps deleting programmes i cant get to the bottom of why it does it
The only benefit for me is the suggesting it gives for new stuff ive not watched
My kids are more interested in netflix than Sky when using tablets etc

You don't need Sky Q to get content on a mobile device - you get Sky Go with the other packages. Sky Q only works on tablets etc at home when you are on the Sky wifi network.

I have it and I can't see any benefits yet (I've had it for 5 months).

I called last month to get a better deal or cancel.
The retentions team offering was poor so I said I wanted to cancel so I got out through to cancellations. They offered a much better deal still on sky+ rather than Q.
The main advantage of Q is the 4K which is worthless if you don't have a 4K tv. I do but still didn't seem worth it. It relies much more on your internet too. So if that isn't fast it can dampen the Q experience.

I never watch things on a mobile device but I love Q. I prefer the new multi room where you're watching stuff thats recorded on your main box rather than each box recording it's own stuff. I've not had a single recording clash since I upgraded either

Thanks all. No 4K TV here (to DH's chagrin) and we don't watch much more than 'normal telly' - we use the recording feature but not really box sets or on demand- I wonder if it's even worth having Sky+ or if we should look at Freesat!

Imo its not really that great

The multi room box is potable so you can watch on any of the tv's in your house. You can either have one or two if you think more than two people in the house will watch sky at same time. Costs more for two.

The big advantage for me is that you are renting the box and therefore if it breaks down they fix it, unlike the sky box that you have to pay for.

Got it fitted on Monday liking it so far. I like that you can pause something in one room and continue watching it in another (or on mobile device). The most mini boxes I believe you can have are 2.

I have just renewed mine. We have sky q with one extra mini box. Unlimited fibre evening weekend calls line rental and sky go for £52. Just ring up and cancel and then call back couple of weeks later. Broadband doesn't disconnect until new provider requests so you have a 4 week window. You can have up to 4 boxes I think but not sure if you can play on all 4 at the same time. Must admit I don't like the menu - prefer sky+. My kids seem to like it although they seem to be unknowingly downloading everything rather than just watching.

Omg! I just started a thread like this without realising this was here! Sorry for duplication

My kids seem to like it although they seem to be unknowingly downloading everything rather than just watching.

But that's how on-demand works on Sky - you download the file rather than streaming it, then delete it afterwards.

My TV broke six months ago, so replaced with a 4K one. So then got Sky Q to get 4K stuff to watch. There isn't much 4K stuff on, and for my new TV screen size and viewing distance, I can't really tell the difference between 4K and HD. I knew in advance this would probably be the case. I figured most content would be HD, so the best TV size was the biggest that was good for HD. For the record, my view distance is just over 7 feet, and screen size is 55 inches. To get the benefit of 4K pixels, ideally I would have to go to 65 inches.

For 99.9% of households, their viewing-distance to screen-size ratio is going to mean that the difference in number of pixels between HD and 4K is of no benefit.

Having said that, more pixels is only one of the differences between HD and UHD, others are twice as many frames per second, which might be beneficial when watching sport, more different colours, and a wider colour range. (To explain the difference between the last two, more different colours means for example extra shades of red between existing ones, whereas wider colour range means shades of red outside the HD range.) Another difference is that the dynamic range, difference between brightest and darkest parts of the picture, is bigger. (Sky don't support this yet but probably will in future.)

In short, the eventual benefit I hope to see from UHD is better pixels, rather than more pixels.

In order to get get UHD from Sky you have to have the larger Sky Q Silver box, and pay £12 a month multiscreen subscription, even if you never watch TV on anything other than your main screen.

The Sky Q silver box has 12 tuners, which can get all get their signal from one input cable. So if like me you live in a flat and have only one satellite feed, Sky Q means you can record more than one channel at the same time for the first time. This was a major benefit for me, I can schedule as many recording as I live without ever worrying there won't be a spare tuner available.

Of the 12 tuners, 5 or 6 can be used for making simultaneous recordings, two can be used to supply live TV to miniboxes, two to supply live TV to tables or phone, one is for watching live TV, one is spare. (Think there might be possibility of having one channel in a window while watching a different one, which takes another tuner, but I haven't come across how to do that, so may be mistaken.)

To answer a question, you can have I think up to four mini-boxes, but you can only use two at the same time. (Sending a signal from the main box to the mini-box uses lots of network bandwidth, there's only so much data the main box can transmit simultaneously.)

Another issue for multi-room users is that you can't separate recording by person/room, when anyone watches from any TV, they will see all recording made by anyone from any mini-box. Some people from multi-room setups apparently find this very annoying, they don't want to see each others stuff.

Sorry, mixing up my terminology, multi-room is a sky HD term, the Sky Q equivalent is called multi-screen, and the problem is that it differs in that everyone's recordings are on the same hard shared hard-disk, rather than on separate boxes as they were with Sky HD multi-room.

We got Sky Q a few months ago, it's alright but I'm not mega impressed with it. Ours keeps deleting stuff we've recorded which is REALLY annoying, no idea why that's happening. DH insisted on getting the Ultra HD package because our TV is 4K, he likes that for sports, but I personally can't tell any difference & wouldn't spend the extra money on it. Also because we (he!) opted for Ultra HD we had to get multi-room, but we only have 1 TV in the house so that's a complete waste IMO.
Having said all that, we only got Sky Q because our old package was costing too much, so we cancelled & then re-joined, & now we're paying less for this upgraded package than we were for the old one.

If you don't watch much tv have you considered now tv? We have just done this and it was pretty good for what we wanted. Don't watch much, mainly kids stuff and a few sky Atlantic bits.

I love ours. It means I can go upstairs and carry on watching something, it stops all the clashes of recordings, DS2 uses it for YouTube which is easier than faffing with the tv, I much prefer the interface and I do see the benefit of UHD.

My only gripe is that the mini box loses connection at least once a week. But that might be my internet set up.

My kids seem to like it although they seem to be unknowingly downloading everything rather than just watching.

But that's how on-demand works on Sky - you download the file rather than streaming it, then delete it afterwards.

It's very annoying I have to say! They seem to everything via on demand!

I'd love to comment but I've been waiting five fucking months for the wankers to come and install it. And they had the audacity to charge me for it (again) which means another phone call to "customer services" in the morning.

Bell ends.

We have it and it’s great.

Apart from the bastard touchpad remote control that never fucking works! We spend half our tv watching lives now trying to ge5 the sodding play button to work. It’s the cause if most of the swearing in the house too (childless couple, don’t worry lol).

That’s my only complaint though. You do get a traditional button remote too but that only controls the tv and we like being able to control the tv and surround system with it.

We have it, it's ok, I find it's far less easy to navigate than Sky + and quite patchy with needing to be reset and sometimes having no signal, this is the first time we have had multi room though and I do love that, if I could have had Sky + multi room that would have been perfect!