I have Sky Q, and in the past had various different releases of the Sky boxes. All of these, of course, had a local hard disc enabling the flexibility to pause, record and watch TV when we wish. To my mind this facility is now indispensable. We use it for deferring a programme by a few minutes (often to allow fast forwarding of the adverts) through to keeping a favourite film long term.
Speculation is that Sky will move away from satellite feeds to streaming. I can see the business sense of this, replacing the satellites when they come to end of life and fixing dishes to customer’s properties must be more expensive than using the increasing availability of high speed broadband. Especially if you have a stake in that sector too.
When I first heard about Sky Glass I read that it would use cloud storage. I assumed that meant that each user would have their own cloud storage allocation on Sky’s servers to use just like Sky Q’s local hard disc. My assumption was clearly wrong, they meant using the various catch up services, for me this does not replace the record facility.
From what I have read, Virgin Media’s 360 box combines streaming and local hard disc storage. I have never used this, or even seen it in action, but I imagined it working just like Sky Q.
I wonder whether Sky will produce a box that is “Sky Stream with a hard disc”, or even implement the concept of user cloud storage to replace the hard disc. Surely this must be their direction or they will lose customers like me who want the flexibility that Sky Q offers over Stream.
What do people on here think will happen in the future with Sky boxes?
Would you move from Sky Q to Stream as it is implemented now?
