Morning all, I have been monitoring all of your helpful comments on this over the past few weeks. I first reported the download failure issue on 7 December though I appreciate many of you have been experiencing these issues for a lot longer. Since then I have had a number of long conversations with Sky, generally I have to say with genuinely concerned Sky agents who have tried everything within their knowledge to resolve this issue, including various resets, updates (including factory reset resulting in loss of recordings) and eventually a replacement box. These remedies seemed to work temporarily and then the download failure issue recurrs. I have also noted with interest those of you that have helpfully suggested a number of temporary fixes such as changing dns settings though I have to say I have resisted doing this as I do not fully understand the implications of doing so. The Sky agent I spoke to also was very clear that changing settings is not a recommended solution and that I should await a permenant solution which I was assured Sky are working on.
Therefore over the Christmas break I decided not to try and download anything and give the solution time to emerge. Last night I tried to download and watch an episode of The Lost Symbol and although I didnt get the dreaded "download failure" message, it seemed to take an age to download and I then just got a highly pixelated image that was impossible to watch. When I tried to delete it I then got the message "this programme cannot be deleted as it is currently being viewed". It wasn't being viewed, but is was apparently still downloading even though I had tried to cancel the download. To clarify, I have watched loads of movies via Netflix and Amazon as well as on demand programmes via iPlayer etc and these have all worked fine. The issue seems confined to Sky channel on demand only. My broadband is working fine and I believe the question of broadband provider is a red herring as this issue is clearly happening irrespective of provider and the Sky agents I have spoken to have acknowledged this fact.
Now I am not as technical on these issues as many of you clearly are however as a reasonably savvy user of this type of tech, I just can't help but conclude that this has got something to do with bandwidth and/or server capacity but in a way that specifically affects Sky programmes. At the same time this issue does seem to have coincided with the launch of Sky Glass and therefore I believe it is quite reasonable to assume the two issues are related in some way, perhaps to do with reserving server/system capacity for Sky Glass users? I'm sure there are many of you that would understand the technical possibilities of this being at least part of the cause better than me. Equally, could the issue also be related to the fact that the demand for downloading is simply exceeding system infrastructure capacity though that perhaps doesn't explain why only Sky programmes are being affected?
I haven't been able to monitor all responses on this forum so apologies if I have missed or covered things that have already been discussed. Has there been any input on this forum from Sky technical? I f not, given the several hundred messages that are now on here, I suggest now would be a good time to hear from Sky.
Happy New Year
