Sky Player: Sky TV for all, via the Internet

By Ian Morris on 24 November 2008, 3:33pm

Sky has offered live streaming of channels such as Sky News for some time now, but only to subscribers. In a move designed to hit some subscriber targets, Sky is making its Sky Player available to people who don't have a standard subscription and a dish. Instead, you'll just need a really understanding ISP.

The company has yet to finalise pricing for this service, or what content it will be able to show in this way -- it's likely that some big American shows, such as Lost, might not appear. But it certainly seems the company is keen to open up its channels to people who don't want to (or can't) have a dish bolted to the side of their house.

So, the question is, what would you be prepared to pay for a service like this? Bear in mind, Sky Player only allows you to watch on one PC -- moving it to another PC involves a call to customer services. It won't be that easy to watch things on your TV, because there will be all sorts of DRM to prevent such activity, and we suspect the quality won't be that good either.

Sky isn't the only broadcaster getting more interested in live streaming. The BBC has announced that BBC One and BBC Two will both live-stream sometime soon, and ISPs the country over are shuddering at the thought of all their bandwidth being consumed by people watching Strictly over the Internet.

We'd also like to see broadcasters come together with this sort of thing. Installing all these apps on your PC is a recipe for disaster, and a unified application for such things would really help reduce computer clutter, and would make supporting non-Windows platforms much more practical. What are your thoughts? Let us know in the comments section below, or via our forums.