Do you remember these vintage Sky Boxes?
1989
Sky Launched in the UK on the 5th Feb 1989. There were a multitude of analogue boxes out there; you could rearrange the EPG so you could have channels listed how you wanted (unlike now where the EPG is fixed). In the early days, agents in the contact centre had to memorise multiple box instructions as the set-up menus were all different.
1997
Sky Digital launched in 1997, introducing Sky Box Office that offered pay-per-view movies. In 1998, the UK's first digital TV service with over 140 channels came, and later the EPG - Electronic Program Guide.
Sky integrated TV IDTV and Digibox after that. The Queen had one in Balmoral! We stopped supporting the software in 2005. If a customer needed a service call, they would just be given a Digibox as we could not service TVs!
The Sky Mini Box was a 12v small Multiroom box, very popular with people who had caravans! They would be perfect for the getaway family holiday to Butlins, when all you wanted to do was snuggle up on the big sofa and watch Die Hard.
The Sony SD Digibox came with Sony software that had an optical lead that worked with DD, although there were no DD channels at that point in time. If the box was serviced by Sky, we put our software on it which took that feature away.
You may not remember but our first PVR was in collaboration with TIVO! This was a short lived adventure; although people that bought them loved them and kept several for many years. The software was never updated as it was that good and they had features like remote series link before anyone!
2001
Our first Sky+ box was from Thomson, it was very heavy and had a massive 40Gbs hard drive that gave a massive 20hrs of recordings.
2003-05
The PVR2 Sky+ launched in 2003, and it had a 40Gbs HDD and 20 hrs of recording.
The PVR3 Sky+ launched in 2005 and it had 160Gbs with 80hrs standard recording.
Do you still have any of these Sky boxes?
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