Sky TV without a dish – it’s finally here, but there’s a catch

By | October 18, 2021
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Sky have been talking for years about ditching the dishes on people’s houses and transmitting all their TV over the internet instead.  It’s been a long time coming, but this month they’re finally launching it.  Except it’s not quite what we’ve been expecting.

Instead of coming as a box that you plug into your TV, “Sky Glass” is an actual TV!  It’s a fancy, 4K smart TV with Sky built in, that you just plug into your broadband and away you go.  You don’t need to have a separate box in your lounge or a satellite dish on your roof.  

It seems like an odd move to me, though – what if you don’t need a new TV?  My TV’s perfectly fine, thank you.  

And (at the moment at least) you can’t just go out and buy one, either.  If you want one of these Sky Glass TVs, you have to take out their “Ultimate TV” package at the same time (which includes Netflix).  They’re offering something a bit like a mobile phone contract – you pay for the TV over four years, together with the TV package and Netflix all for one monthly fee (£39 a month for the 43” version of the TV).  At the end of four years, you’ll have paid for the TV and it’s yours to keep.  

But in the age of BBC iPlayer, All 4, Now TV, Netflix, Amazon Prime and all the rest… it feels like an awful lot of money to spend on TV.  It’s entirely possible that I’m just being a miserly skinflint, though – wouldn’t be the first time…

Word to the Wise – Wiki

I was looking through some old emails the other day and found this little snippet in one of them.  “Wiki”s are all over the place these days, so I thought it was a nice one to dust off…

A wiki is a type of website that’s written and updated by its users.  For example a product review site where anyone can add a review. The most famous example is Wikipedia which is an online encyclopedia put together by thousands of people around the world.  But there are loads of others out there, too: 

  • Wikihow is rammed with “how-to” articles about everything from how to revive a friendship to growing shallots in your garden.  A lot of the content is written by ordinary users, but it’s checked and approved by experts to make sure the instructions are reliable!
  • Fandom is a huge wiki library where you can discover and share information about films, games, books and TV shows.
  • Wiktionary is, as the name suggests, a collaborative dictionary.  In here you’ll find not just simple definitions, but etymologies, usage rules, synonyms, antonyms, quotes and all sorts.   

If you’re curious about the name, “wiki” means quick in Hawaiian – the idea being that this is a quick way to share ideas over the web.

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