So earlier this week Sky announced that their NowTV service offers the ability to live stream several of their channels, plus get on demand with some back catalogues.
It’s an additional monthly cost on top of the Movies or Sport, but at £4.99 a month with no contract it seemed like a worthwhile trial.
The current channels available are
- Sky 1
- Sky Living
- Sky Atlantic
- Gold
- Comedy Central
- Fox
- MTV
- Sky Arts 1
- Discovery Channel
- Disney Channel
It doesn’t include any of the sub channels that these might have like the 2s or +1s, and some programmes have rights restrictions stopping them from being streamed (The Simpsons, Futurama, The Office, ER).
As Sky 1, Atlantic and Fox would have been the few channels I might have watched if I did get Sky, and at a starting price of £21.50 for just Sky Entertainment, £4.99 looks like a bargain.
On Demand has at today’s count 122 different shows available, for some it’s the last 30 days worth, Arrow (Sky One), whilst Grey’s Anatomy (ABC Studios) has all 8 seasons.
Several shows which recently aired appear to be missing the latest episode, Walking Dead (Fox) only has episode 1, and The Tunnel (Sky Atlantic) the first two.
For this service to be worthwhile the catchup need to contain all the shows they legal have the rights to, asap after they first aired.
The other issue is that the Android app doesn’t support the Entertainment package at the moment (coming soon early 2014) and even then, the app itself is only supported on a limited number of devices which haven’t been rooted.
For the next few months I’ll see how much I end up using, if it isn’t enough it’s easy enough to cancel.