Sky Reveals My Sky+ Plans
June 24, 2011 
6 Comments
Sky TV will start installations of its 1TB My Sky+ PVR from July 11.
Orders for the uber-box can be taken from July 1.
It will cost $20 a month to rent (plus $99 for installation) but will offer four times as much recording storage as the $15-a-month My Sky HDi.
Alternatively, subscribers can pay a one-off, upfront fee of $649 instead of the monthly option.
My Sky+ won’t provide any functionality beyond My Sky HDi, which Sky will continue to offer for $15 a month.
But it will afford up to 130 hours of HD recordings – although only 640GB of its hard drive space is for personal recordings; the rest is for ondemand downloads.
HDi has been dropped from the model description merely because Sky thought My Sky HDi+ would be too much of a mouthful.
At this stage the only downside to the upgrade appears to be the inability, because of digital rights management issues, to transfer archived recordings from a My Sky HDi to the My Sky +.
So early adopters may need to undergo a catch-up marathon before the swap.
According to Sky’s director of marketing, Michael Watson, “The launch of My Sky has been a phenomenal success.
“The reason it has proven so popular with our customers is because it delivers so many real benefits and has truly changed the way many people watch television.
“Our customer feedback and research told us that a considerable number of My Sky users desired more personal recording capacity. This need is likely to increase with the growing prevalence of high definition shows.
“We developed My Sky+ to deliver that additional recording space, with four times more capacity but still with all the My SKY HDi features users are accustomed to.”
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June 24, 2011 at 8:28 pm
Seems that the extra cost of having this DVR is not going down well with the folks at Geekzone.
Why can’t Sky just allow current My Sky HDi customers to attach an external hard drive through the USB or eSATA connections?
Hollywood studios are paranoid enough about Sky subscribers using their My Sky HDis to archive HD recordings of their movies. They certainly don’y want to see subscribers having access to that content beyond Sky’s box. So they’ve imposed digital rights management (DRM) restrictions that prevent My Sky HDi’s connection to non-proprietary hard drives. TiVo used to offer one from Western Digital but that no longer seems to be available. TiVo in NZ uses the FreeviewHD platform, so DRM restrictions aren’t as draconian because the movies are at least several years old and punctuated by ad breaks whereas Sky’s are ad-free and barely a year old in most cases.
But with TiVo you can copy content from the DVR to your PC with the network package
From what I understand, all recordings stored on My Sky HDi hard drives are encrypted by Sky. They are then decoded by the My Sky box during playback just as if you were watching the programme live. So I still can’t understand why we can’t record to external hard drives. If the content is encrypted and can only be decoded using Sky hardware (decoders), then what’s the issue?
Sky says this is correct but due to the content rights issues around offering or allowing external hard drives, it it has opted to provide a larger internal hard drive with My Sky+ instead.