Sky Max - Please upgrade your subscription

[BiggieDuk]

My sky max has stopped working today and it's saying that I need to upgrade my subscription to upgrade but I had it last night and I also have the full subscription 

Moderator note: subject of thread updated to better reflect the conversation

[Jporch316 · Accepted solution]

@BiggieDuk 

Have you tried pulling the plug from the socket for 5 minutes

[MiltonSt]

Has anyone tried unplugging for 5 mins, and did that work, as I can't see why it would ?

I've just started suffering from this issue of "not being able to watch Sky Max for more than 5 mins before being thrown off the channel and advised that I don't have that subscription - when it's part of the base Sky Glass package".

So I'm trying the 5 min power off and will report back whether it works or not.

[SlenderRobert]

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@MiltonSt wrote:

Has anyone tried unplugging for 5 mins, and did that work, as I can't see why it would ?

I've just started suffering from this issue of "not being able to watch Sky Max for more than 5 mins before being thrown off the channel and advised that I don't have that subscription - when it's part of the base Sky Glass package".

So I'm trying the 5 min power off and will report back whether it works or not.

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Did it work???? I've been waiting for your response since 9.12pm... the suspense is killing me! 

[MiltonSt]

Amazingly the power off and power back on seems to have fixed the Sky Max not being in my subscription package.

My guess is that the Sky Viewing card number (or equivalent in Sky Glass) needed refreshing, and that powering off for 5 mins allowed any capacitors to discharge, which were keeping alive the corrupted cache which was storing my Sky Viewing card number, and therefore when it powered on again, it had to communicate "home" to identify whose account (Sky viewing card number or equivalent) was allocated to this Sky Glass unit, and then downloaded that unique ID into a local cache on the Sky Glass unit which then identified SkyMax as being part of my subscription.

(well that's my guess anyway, but maybe it just realised that it didn't like being powered off so decided to play ball and let me watch Sky Max in fear of being turned off again - who knows)

[techman9]

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@MiltonSt wrote:

My guess is that the Sky Viewing card number (or equivalent in Sky Glass) needed refreshing, and that powering off for 5 mins allowed any capacitors to discharge, which were keeping alive the corrupted cache which was storing my Sky Viewing card number, and therefore when it powered on again, it had to communicate "home" to identify whose account (Sky viewing card number or equivalent) was allocated to this Sky Glass unit, and then downloaded that unique ID into a local cache on the Sky Glass unit which then identified SkyMax as being part of my subscription.

(well that's my guess anyway, but maybe it just realised that it didn't like being powered off so decided to play ball and let me watch Sky Max in fear of being turned off again - who knows)

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nah it's just rubbish, thus reboot requirements a lot of the time.

[Fothergill1]

@MiltonSt  As with any piece of electronic equipment a reboot is the first thing to try.  If you phone Sky they will usually ask you to reboot before doing anything else.

I have actually got into the habit of doing a voluntary reboot every few days and believe this is the reason I don't get too many issues.  It seems to clear the niggles before they become a problem.

[MiltonSt]

Being in the IT industry, I also have my Sky Glass on a timer to power off at 2am every night and on again at 02:05am to workaround another Sky Glass issue with losing Ethernet and Wi-Fi connectivity every few days, and I don't suffer from that anymore... but that didn't fix the Sky Max issue, however I did power it off for much longer than 5 mins and I'm guessing that allowed the Capacitors to drain so whatever cache they were powering had to be reinstated when it powered up, and that seems to have fixed the Sky Max issue (for the time being anyway)

[Fothergill1]

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@MiltonSt wrote:

Being in the IT industry, I also have my Sky Glass on a timer to power off at 2am every night and on again at 02:05am to workaround another Sky Glass issue with losing Ethernet and Wi-Fi connectivity every few days, and I don't suffer from that anymore...

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@MiltonSt When I first subscribed to Glass a little over a year ago every morning it used to say no network and we had to reboot.  I found simply turning ON the Networked Standby mode resolved the issue (Settings > Start up & Standby).

You might well be right about capacitors etc but that is out of my limited expertise.  It's a tip worth remembering though 👍

[MiltonSt]

Thanks Fothergill, I just checked in Settings and discovered that I already have "Networked Standby Mode" already ON, but this menu is new to me, and I'm sure it wasn't there in Apr 2022 when we purchased Sky Glass. So I'm going to disable my scheduled 2am power off then on again to see if this new setting means that I won't lose the network every few days. Which will be really good if it does.

[Fothergill1]

@MiltonSt It was definitely there in July 2022.  I actually found I got rid of almost all the things that initially annoyed me with Glass by switching off everything in that menu except for the Networked Standby Mode.  Obviously some users will like these features but to me they were just gimmicks.

[Jporch316]

@MiltonSt 

I suffered from network drop outs regularly while using powerline adapters

i since purchased a used google mesh WiFi system and switched my glass to WiFi and have had no drop outs since 

[Chrisee]

@Fothergill1 I have had Sky Glass and 3 pucks since November 2021 and in the early days had a fair share of network issues. Sky have put in a number of fixes and for the last 12 months I have had minimal issues with wifi. The key as @Jporch316 posts is having a good resiliant home wifi network or to use ethernet. The prime gain of setting the units to remain networked in standby is a faster wake from standby. 

Your theory of how account permissions work is from what little I know is incorrect . The permissions are set from the account informstion held on Sky's servers the conection is simply authorised by the units id which is established when the connection starts. Rebooting reloads the firmware and resets the connection to the server and can clear glitches like the Upgrade bug which Sky say they are sorting. The best analogy of how the system works is the unit is like a browser or a thin client with minimal local processing connecting to a server which does the heavy lifting. So for example apps run remotely.

Sky recommend a 30 sec downtime as being sufficent to reset the unit as it forces a reboot which reloads the firmware. I agree some TVs  need longer to fully reboot but Glass does not seem to need to. I only reboot my units if they glitch which happens somewhere around monthly. I find they run best if left alone. but YMMV.

[Fothergill1]

@Chrisee Thanks for the interesting and informative post which I have bookmarked for future reference.

In relation to the Networked Standby Mode, when we first got Glass in July 22 every morning we go the No Network message and had to reboot but since turning it on we never had a problem in the morning.  We still occasionally lose connection but probably no more than once a month.

I am lucky that I have fast (460mbps with Netflix test) but more importantly it is generally very stable which is why I believe I have relatively few issues with Glass 😀