@Johndm1957 wrote:
You'd like to think as Sky move from dish to streaming the massive reduction in costs would bring the prices down.
The cost to install and maintail dishes, then rent transponder bandwith on satellites and uplink stations must be huge?
The infrastructure for their streaming platform is quite extensive and also expensive to maintain, and is also now global, being designed and curated by Comcast. The hardware is also now even more mass market with the XiOne Comcast box now spreading across the US as the Xumo Stream box, the UK and Europe as the Stream puck and in Australia as the Hubbl Hub.
Glass TV's too are heading out across Europe and Australia and to South Africa by the end of the year. It's by no means cheap and they are a business after all. If customers have gotten used to paying X amount for a satellite service then it's assumed they'll pay similar for roughly the same service delivered via broadband. Although it's quite clever that they can create the illusion of it being cheaper by not including the additional cost of the broadband in the overall cost...
With Sky Stream/Glass you're also paying a bit extra for the simplicity and convenience of having everything (or as much as Sky can afford) in the one place. Most customers like to have this convenience - if they didn't then Sky wouldn't exist. It's a full TV service with free to air channel streams, pay TV channels, apps and the playlist, all held together under a familiar looking UI. You're basically paying for a vast quantity of content - the vast majority of which you'll never ever watch, but just knowing that it's there is enough to keep most people happy - there will always be something to watch.
You can however get pretty much everything that's available on Sky Stream/Glass elsewhere, often for cheaper, but not wrapped up and delivered in the comfortable blue Sky UI which customers know and love.
