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Sky Player or "What Kind Of Racket are Media Providers Running Anyway?"
Came home on Sunday evening to find my housemates had signed us up to this thing called Sky Player. I'd be interested on the general view on this because after a day of using it, I'm in two very different minds.
One the one hand, we've been looking for a way to watch sport that isn't financially onerous, but ideally wouldn't involve switching media providers. Sky Player would seem to fit that bill. We signed up for a package that gives us access to all the Sky Sports channels and a small dribble of other shit no-one would ever want to watch for £25 a month for three months. This enables us to use the Sky Player on our PCs and crucially through the Xbox in the living room.
All well and good: £25 is comparable to what you'd actually have to pay for Sky Sports anywhere else. That said, however, there are some issues.
For one thing - it is *exactly* comparable to the deal we'd get elsewhere: Sky Sports on Virgin that we have now costs £25 p/m on top of the current package (consists of Dave and fuck-all else). Sky Sports on Sky Player will rise to £30-something a month after the three month trial period. And you can only use it on XBox if you have a gold Live account (at however much that costs a month), which I'm not all that enamoured of at the moment. In fact, if I'd had this run by me before they'd ordered it, I might have vetoed it on this basis, but whatever...
So why not just switch to Sky so we can definitely watch what we pay for on the TV they promised? I thought that wouldn't really work since for us since Sky's internet packages are piss poor. They still limit downloads for chrissakes. But then I took another look:
What we have: Virgin Crappackage + Unlimited 10mb internet = £28pm
Options:
a) Virgin + Sky Sports + Unlimited 10mb internet = £63pm
b) Virgin + Sky Player + Xbox Gold subscription = £70pm+
c) Sky with Sky Sports + Unlimited 20mb internet = £50pm
Based on this, it's obvious: We should switch to Sky, right? What am I not thinking of?