Why can't sky just make a normal 4K box?

robfosters · 23 Jul 2016 at 11:50

Bloody stupid restricting it to sky Q. Many households have more than three boxes, while with sky q, you can only view live channels in 3 boxes, so sky q is not an option for them.

Would it be so hard for them to produce a normal 4K box for use with the Sky HD system?

theone8181 · 23 Jul 2016 at 12:40

robfosters said:
Bloody stupid restricting it to sky Q. Many households have more than three boxes, while with sky q, you can only view live channels in 3 boxes, so sky q is not an option for them.

Would it be so hard for them to produce a normal 4K box for use with the Sky HD system?

Might well release an updated mini box that displays 4k.

Puzzled · 23 Jul 2016 at 12:42

Tbh they can't even do proper full HD content so I'd just let your TV do the scaling.

I know they are bringing out (or may have already done so) higher quality content but I wouldn't expect to see much difference.

TheVoice · 23 Jul 2016 at 12:47

More than three people watching TV as it's broadcast at once? The whole point of Sky is that you record stuff and watch it at your leisure.

McBain · 23 Jul 2016 at 18:10

There doesn't seem to be any middle ground, i'm interested in 4K content but not interested in all this fluid crap, or multi room.

chaparral · 24 Jul 2016 at 11:20

robfosters said:
Bloody stupid restricting it to sky Q. Many households have more than three boxes, while with sky q, you can only view live channels in 3 boxes, so sky q is not an option for them.

And the price of there sky Q setup is crazy...For me it would cost an extra £16.17 per month plus a £149 install charge
(Think this was also before there price increase)

chaparral said:
chaparral said:

I just looked how much I would pay if I went for the new sky Q setup with the same Sky package I have now

MY currant sky package with multi room + sky movies + HD pack is £57.83
SKY Q with the same package £74 plus a £149 installation charge

It would be an extra £16.17 per month (Not counting the £149 installation charge) if I changed to sky Q

Here a screen shot below of my lastest sky bill (Just in case i miss something)

Click to expand...

Vertigo · 25 Jul 2016 at 07:58

robfosters said:
Bloody stupid restricting it to sky Q. Many households have more than three boxes, while with sky q, you can only view live channels in 3 boxes, so sky q is not an option for them.

Would it be so hard for them to produce a normal 4K box for use with the Sky HD system?

A miniscule percentage of households will have more than three boxes.

Why do people insist on believing that their niche requirement is somehow shared with a significant percentage of the population? Sky will have done their research and, if there were more than a tiny number of customers with four boxes or more, they wouldn't have launched a new system which only allowed two minis.

Vertigo · 25 Jul 2016 at 08:02

McBain said:
There doesn't seem to be any middle ground, i'm interested in 4K content but not interested in all this fluid crap, or multi room.

There's your answer. They bundle all of it together as part of the new service to tempt people into upgrading.

4K requires new hardware anyway so they've taken the opportunity to drastically update the system and offer it as a new service. Makes perfect business sense as the ideal opportunity to roll out upgraded hardware and to tempt people to upgrade to it.

Are you suggesting that they should produce yet another box which is just a 4K compatible version of the existing Sky+HD one? Why on earth would they do that? It'd cost them a load more money to engineer and manufacture and would have to be offered at a lower price than Q so they'd lose some potential Q customers to it. Makes no business sense whatsoever.

jpaul · 25 Jul 2016 at 08:31

Also absence of competitive 4k live-streaming services, so sky trying to make as much money whilst they have this exclusive market segment; suspect the average broadband is not yet >12Mb/s required to support 4k and terrestrial transmitters (4K material too expensive for freeview) so - they make hay whilst the sun shines.
[it would be interesting to know about 4K delivery in the USA/Japan, also why do Virgin/BT/Amazon ? not consider satellite delivery of live 4k]

Psycho Sonny · 25 Jul 2016 at 14:09

robfosters said:
Many households have more than three boxes

Really? I don't know anyone with more than 3 boxes. In fact most people have either 1 or 2. It's rare to see someone with 3 (I know of 1 family) never mind more than 3.

McBain · 25 Jul 2016 at 14:49

Vertigo1 said:
There's your answer. They bundle all of it together as part of the new service to tempt people into upgrading.

4K requires new hardware anyway so they've taken the opportunity to drastically update the system and offer it as a new service. Makes perfect business sense as the ideal opportunity to roll out upgraded hardware and to tempt people to upgrade to it.

Are you suggesting that they should produce yet another box which is just a 4K compatible version of the existing Sky+HD one? Why on earth would they do that? It'd cost them a load more money to engineer and manufacture and would have to be offered at a lower price than Q so they'd lose some potential Q customers to it. Makes no business sense whatsoever.

Losing customers doesn't make business sense either, but that's exactly what's happened where i'm concerned.

NexusK · 25 Jul 2016 at 15:32

McBain said:
Losing customers doesn't make business sense either, but that's exactly what's happened where i'm concerned.

So you've left them over it? Seems a bit daft considering Virgin don't even do 4k yet and BT pretty much only do their sport channel and Netflix so far. It's not like you are going to get what you want elsewhere.

McBain · 25 Jul 2016 at 16:14

NexusK said:
So you've left them over it? Seems a bit daft considering Virgin don't even do 4k yet and BT pretty much only do their sport channel and Netflix so far. It's not like you are going to get what you want elsewhere.

Might seem daft to you perhaps, but if it was daft to me I wouldn't have done it.

FrankJH · 25 Jul 2016 at 16:43

Vertigo1 said:
Are you suggesting that they should produce yet another box which is just a 4K compatible version of the existing Sky+HD one? Why on earth would they do that? It'd cost them a load more money to engineer and manufacture and would have to be offered at a lower price than Q so they'd lose some potential Q customers to it. Makes no business sense whatsoever.

Not sure why they couldnt have just updated the current Sky box to 4k instead of designing Q, would make much more sense and would have been cheaper to do.

HangTime · 25 Jul 2016 at 17:00

I agree it is annoying (as someone who has slow broadband this is the only way I could get live 4k TV) but I don't think it is stupid. They are quite rightly going to milk it just like they did 10 years ago with HD (monthly subscription for same channels in HD, some ridiculous charge like £249 for Sky HD box etc).

If it wasn't for the £149 install fee I'd probably be looking at going Sky Q.

Vertigo · 25 Jul 2016 at 17:25

McBain said:
Losing customers doesn't make business sense either, but that's exactly what's happened where i'm concerned.

And you're part of a tiny percentage of people who will leave them over this and which won't affect their bottom line in any appreciable way.

FrankJH said:
Not sure why they couldnt have just updated the current Sky box to 4k instead of designing Q, would make much more sense and would have been cheaper to do.

Sky Q is about far more than just 4K. Just because all you want is 4K and nothing else from Q doesn't mean others feel the same way.

McBain · 25 Jul 2016 at 19:29

Vertigo1 said:
And you're part of a tiny percentage of people who will leave them over this and which won't affect their bottom line in any appreciable way.

You could well be right, i'll take comfort in knowing i'm not getting bent over anymore.

bru · 27 Jul 2016 at 21:56

There are quite a few issues with Sky Q for currant Sky HD multi room users.

Like I'm my case 2TB in my lounge and 1TB in the bedroom 512GB in my sons bedroom. You can only have 1 Sky Q box with a HDD, the rest have to be mini's, so I would almost halve my storage capacity. 4K TV in the lounge and in the bedroom, but the Sky mini's wont allow 4K content to be watched, only HD. And don't forget that 4K content will require a lot more storage space to record, but 2TB is the biggest box they currently do.

On a side not I've got to upgrade my receiver to a HDCP 2.2 one as well else it wont all work together.

theone8181 · 28 Jul 2016 at 08:01

bru said:
There are quite a few issues with Sky Q for currant Sky HD multi room users.

Like I'm my case 2TB in my lounge and 1TB in the bedroom 512GB in my sons bedroom. You can only have 1 Sky Q box with a HDD, the rest have to be mini's, so I would almost halve my storage capacity. 4K TV in the lounge and in the bedroom, but the Sky mini's wont allow 4K content to be watched, only HD. And don't forget that 4K content will require a lot more storage space to record, but 2TB is the biggest box they currently do.

On a side not I've got to upgrade my receiver to a HDCP 2.2 one as well else it wont all work together.

How much can you actually record at 4k? I ask as currently ive got a 2tb box with about 56% space on it, im thinking a 4k program is going to use ~4 times the space which would be about 1.2% (i realise theres not going to be that many 4k programs in the near future).