Phil’s Diary - [Blog @ http://www.philsdiary.net/]
Got around to trying Sky By Broadband today. Basically it allows though who already have either sports or movie packages to download sports clips or movies to the their PCs to watch. It uses P2P technology to download the movies/clips, which I guess eases the load for Sky.
On the upsides, the interface is easy to use and quite slick. Though it’s a Macromedia flash system, so all standard menus, conventions, keyboard shortcuts and the like are out of the window.
The choice of movies is quite reasonable, allowing the download of a reasonable selection of currently showing and past movies
And despite being DRM’d to hell, they do allow you a reasonable time frame to watch the movies, a month in the case of the first movie I downloaded.
It’s also free (you need to be subscribed to Sky and have the correct packages).
So what are the downsides?
- When downloading a movie you have no idea when it’ll finish, no time estimate is given (I guess this is because of the varying nature of P2P, but it’d still have been nice).
- I hate DRM. I dislike the fact that once I’ve download the movie I can’t move it onto, say, our laptop and hook it up to the plasma to watch. I can only watch it on the PC I downloaded it to originally. And of course there’s all the other lovely DRM downsides.
- The P2P distribution services keeps on uploading/downloading when the program has quit. This means for people like me who’s bandwidth is monitored during peak hours, I’ve no easy control over when the program uses bandwidth. (Instead stop the KService service when you want to stop it).
In essence, not bad, definitely consumer friendly. But with a few technological “gotchas” hidden in the background.
Posted by Phil on June 17, 2006 10:36 PM | Categories: Technology
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