Sky TV

We recently signed up for Sky… Annoying monopolistic pay-tv provider that they are.

After answering all their questions on the phone to signup we were given an install date that was about 10 days in the future. If it were rugby season they’d have those deals where it’s a free install if they can’t get it installed before the game.

The thing that annoyed really though was the way it was installed. The installed connected the decoder via RF connection and tuned it into the TV on channel 5 (where Triangle had been), which is a channel Mel said we didn’t watch much. He then connected the decoder directed to the a phone jack without checking whether we had ADSL on the line. That immediately messed up our internet connection - dropping the maximum connection speed to 160k in both directions. Unfortunately it took me a few days to figure out what was wrong with the connection.

So now we have a bunch more channels of crap! Woohoo!

It’s been a few years since we had Sky before - at least it works better now. I had Sky when they upgraded the EPG software - unfortunately the new EPG at the time was a little too demanding for the decoder’s CPU and was almost unusably slow! The new decoder is much faster, and also pretty small. Now we have an Xbox, PS2, DVD Player, VCR and Sky plugged into the TV. And still there’s never anything good to watch.