Is Sky by broadband as crap as I've heard?
Over in the DVdoctor forums, one of the most knowledgeable regulars (and certainly the most helpful) - Gary MacKenzie - posed the question, 'Is Sky by broadband as crap as I've heard?'
My response was, 'That is certainly NOT going to be the conclusion of my review'. Below is the thinking that lead me to say that.
It's my belief that people who are saying that Sky by broadband is crap either haven't seen the footage or haven't thought about all this in a well-rounded way. Or both.
The footage is not hi-res or even standard res - it's 3/4 standard res (540 x 432) - and I have to admit that when I first saw stuff playing I started to think bad things, especially given that I was playing it on a 19in monitor at a resolution of 1280 x1024 and the window in which the video is display is relatively tiny, so I needed to sit up close to see it.
However, if you want to sit back, you can opt to show the footage full-screen and - as long as you don't sit too close - it is perfectly watchable.
There are plenty of issues I've identified, largely with the interface. It's been very poorly thought out and is very much non-Windows standard.
Also, the initial setting up can be a bit of a fag because you have to create a Sky.com account and then create the Sky by broadband account before you even get to download the 50MB installer app.
But these issues are trivial in the grand scheme of things. The interface can be made a lot better (readily I think, because, I believe, it is Flash-based) and the setting up can also be made easier.
You could also argue that it's a drag to wait two hours for a video to download. And you'd be right were it not for the fact that, once you start downloading, you'll always have something to watch that you downloaded already.
Overall, if you actually fancy seeing some footage on your PC, legitimate footage, then this route works and isn't bad for free - though, of course, it's only free to people who are Premium Sky subscribers.
What I do have issues with - but these are very much lessened when I realise that this is the start of something, not an end in itself - are that:
a/ The idea (and the current size and type of footage) probably appeals most to people who work away from home a lot and travel a lot by plane and train - they can have gigs of movies to keep them amused while travelling or in the evening in a hotel.
b/ As things stand, the media you download can only be played on one PC - you can't stream it around the house or use it on a portable media player (I'm thinking of the latest Creative Zen and Sony's Playstation Portable, here, but other options include Apple's iPod and the other stuff that will be coming along, too). And nor can you have multiple PCs download footage from a single account - though you can have multiple user accounts on a single PC, with different "rights", perhaps limiting what youngsters can download by using a PIN number.
Overall, though, I believe this is a brave thing for Sky to have done and something that will be seen in the not too distant future as a very significant and trend-setting starting point.
I see two main things changing over time with the service that Sky offers:
* Resolution - this will increase but when and to what will depend on our getting faster broadband (and that's coming, of course) and the movie studios (and other content suppliers) being convinced that their assets are not going to be ripped off after they've been downloaded. HD will be the resolution target that all the providers such as Sky will have in mind but that will have to wait until many more of the installed base of PCs can comfortably play WMV HD (and, probably, until the digital rights management is better integrated across PCs, network media players and portable players). Resolution is likely to improve in stages, rather than there necessarily being a sudden leap from 3/4 res footage to HD.
* Restrictions on playing on a single PC - I see no future at all for such video-download technologies unless Sky, AOL and others who are (or become) players can convince the content providers to allow them to make available video that can be viewed around the house and on portable devices (but this is all tied up with having tight digital rights management across multiple devices).
I also believe that the cost of the coming generations of higher-res video downloads has to be reasonable (likewise SD or even 3/4-res downloads).
Define reasonable?
Sufficiently cheap for it NOT to be worth potential purchasers opting instead for pirated copies. And I say that, based on the belief that any pirating problems we see now with CDs and DVDs are almost all cause by the greedy sods who run the music labels and movie studios.
They haven't yet been willing to accept that the market decides the correct price for what they're selling ie that underselling the pirates is the only realistic way of driving pirates out of business.
After a bit more to-ing and fro-ing I then rounded off by saying (slightly paraphrased here),
It is the case that you can only enjoy Sky's downloadable service if you are already a premium subscriber. Also any advantages, such as they are, absolutely do not apply to non-subscribers.
Currently Sky derives no extra revenue from this service - except from those people who take up subscriptions primarily so that they can also download movies or sports clips (or for whom the download aspect, plus the broadcasts become considerably more compelling than the broadcasts alone).
So, my take is that there isn't going to be a whole of new people who take out subscriptions because of the initial Sky by broadband service.
It really isn't that relevant what you can do today with a Sky+ box or a DVD recorder.
Nor is it relevant that - if you want to and can be bothered to - it's perfectly possible right now to crack the copy protection on any DVD DVD Video disc (rented or borrowed) and copy it and thus build a massive libary of DVD movies. Though for someone to do this would also require them to be among the small minority of people that know that it is even possible to do this.
And, nor is it relevant that you can build a library of movies on hard disk for viewing in a variety of ways:
* On one or more PCs - desktop or portable
* Streamed from a PC (or multiple PCs) via a network media player for viewing on a TV in the living room or anywhere else in the house
* On portable media players (including Sony PSP, Creative Zen M, the video iPod and other forthcoming products.
And it again needs to be realised that the three methods above assume knowledge of cracking and a willingness to make the effort, plus additional knowledge of repurposing for different playback methods.
What Sky is doing now, I believe, is, effectively, widescale testing of the technologies that will drive future enchanced download systems - the sort of systems that Intel, Microsoft, ATI, Nvidia and almost every big maker of PC hardware wants to see at the centre of our future digital-home "experiences".
And, given that Sky has a large number of premium subscribers (among whom a considerable proportion will have broadband connections) it does potentially have a very large number of guinea-pigs on whom to test things.
These future systems are predicated on three main things:
* Far faster download speeds
* Movie studios (and other content providers) being sufficiently confident in the effectiveness of copy-protection for them to allow downloads in formats that can be streamed around the house and viewed on portable player ("trial" services such as Sky by broadband allow the content providers to judge the effectiveness of copy-protection systems)
* The spec of the average PC being far better than it is today (especially as the target becomes HD-quality).
All three may not come at once but they will the legs upon which future download systems stand.
BSkyB's is a pioneering effort with which it is currently leading the BBC. That's not to say that the BBC, AOL and others aren't pioneers, too, just that BSkyB has at the moment, gone a whole lot further than anyone else in carrying out what I see as initial trials (even though it isn't referring to them as trials).
