Getting rid of Sky+ TV

That’s the plan, anyway! Here’s what I’m thinking so far…

We have had Sky+ since my wife went onto maternity leave from work, as she was getting bored being at home for so long and not being much stuff on day-time Freeview TV. And it meant that I could then get to watch ‘Lost’ on ABC… But it was for her sake, honest.

Anyway, about a year and half has gone by now, and we use Sky+ quite a lot, but not for any Sky-specific channels. We more use it as a modern-day VCR, as it simply records all the channels on the five channels that have been available in the UK for the past 15 years or so, namely, BBC1, BBC2, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5. It’s not that we don’t like anything on any of the other channels, it just worked out like that.

Very, very occasionally there’ll be something that will catch my eye on Sky1, but I couldn't honestly tell you the last thing I watched on there, let alone recorded it for later.

Once all the programmes that we like are ‘Series-Linked’ by Sky+ there’s no immediate rush to watch them, and so we end up having a night here or there catching-up on them.

Currently, our monthly bill for Sky+ is about £20 a month. Not a massive amount, but still £20 less to spend on sweets and chocolate each month.  If I cancel the subscription to Sky, then (I’m told) that the Sky+ feature (i.e. the recording part) will stop working also.

So, the aim is to replace the Sky+ box with something else that doesn’t have a monthly or annual subscription, but will give me the channels that we watch AND have the ability to record programmes for later playback.

However - The menu and remote controller combination for Sky+ is going to take some beating. The interface for the Sky TV guide is very simple to use and easy to record programmes, or even entire series of programmes using the Series Link feature.

I have a Playstation3 console, and there is a TV-tuner adapter available for it, called PlayTV and is £59.99 online. But assuming that it all works fine, that means that I’m restricting the places that I can watch any of the recorded content to the one TV-set in the lounge. 

But, ideally, I’d like something that can record a particular Freeview programme and save it as a file on my computer network. Then, the plan would be to use TVersity on the server, streaming the content to my PlayStation3.

I’ve found a possible solution, but more on that in the next post.