Why I hate Sky

(Putting aside the fifty odd pounds a month they charge me).

I've talked here on more than one occasion about how I watch TV whilst I'm working on repetitive or mundane tasks, using my iMac whilst working on my Laptop. At the moment I'm watching the box sets of the Soprano's.

Now sky only allows one device to have access to their app on a phone or iPad so that's not an option on my Mac so I'm forced to use their web interface. It takes literally 'dial up' speeds to do anything, you have to log in (obvisouly) but then when connection is lost - as it seems to be every 20 or 30 minutes - you need to log in again, sometimes you can access a TV series menu, sometimes you can't. Watching The Sopranos season 2 was virtually impossible unless you knew the magic search terms to find it.

I went back to a season 4 episode on Monday after a five day break and it 'resumed' from my previously watched place but if I come back to an episode the same day I have to start again from scratch. Sometimes you get no adverts at the start of the program and other times (usually after the connection has been lost) you have to sit through two full minutes of them. Don't understand why there are adverts on the on-line box sets but not on the Sky box version ?

This really is a useless interface - badly conceived and appallingly implemented. Do Sky ever wonder why everyone is talking about Netflix ?

Update on this post 28th January 2016.

Following this post Sky have now removed all of the Sopranos Box sets from the system and I can no longer watch them. This is despite paying over £ 58 per month for my subscription. It seems that I would have to upgrade again (despite having everything other than sports already). You can debate the rights and wrongs of this but when I started watching The Soprano's in December one of the (never-ending) promos that player was playing before the program began was the ability to watch the Soprano's box set - so they lure you in to watch something, remove it way before you've had time to actually watch all the available series and then take it away unless you pay another £ 15 or £ 20 a month - sounds like the same business model that drug dealers promote to me.

Off in a huff to watch the free stuff on All four, ITV Hub and iPlay or even Netflix at £ 6 per month !