Sky+ is a real Plus (Sky Plus (Sky+))

Member Name: Whizz11

Product:	Sky Plus (Sky+)
Date:	14/01/09 (548 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Record, pause, series link

Disadvantages: Expensive, awful customer service

If you love TV then you probably love your Sky + box and if you haven't already got one you really really need to get one. For me this box is definitely a Plus with one little Minus but I will get to that later.

Sky + is a personal video recorder that allows the user to record, pause and instantly rewind live TV. It works in conjunction with a Sky television subscription. It was launched in September 2001 and in February 2008 Sky announced that over 3 million households now have a Sky + box.

Sky + is such a benefit to have. You access all the features of the recorder through your Sky + remote.

Recording - Sky + allows you to record any programme that you like. It is very simple to do. You do not have to set any timers or set up any video tapes, etc, the show is saved as hardware on the Sky box. Basically you search through the onscreen TV show listings. Once you find the program you want to record you highlight it and then press the little record button on the remote, as simple as that.

An absolutely wonderful feature when it comes to recording in my opinion is the series link function. Once you have decided upon the program you want to record and have pressed the record button you can then press the series link program and it will set to record all the shows in that series so you do not have to go back each day/week to keep on recording. This is great if you are the type of person to forget things as you could end up missing parts of a series but with series link you don't!

Sky + allows you to record two things at once if the TV is switched off but you cannot then watch a third channel when two things are recording.

Watching - once you have recorded your shows they are very simple to watch. You go to your recordings page and scroll through to see what you have. When you find the show you want you press play and enjoy it. The recording allows you to pause, rewind or fast forward at any time too so very handy if you want to miss all the adverts. Sky + also allows you to pause live TV as well which is a great benefit. Say you are watching something and the phone goes, you can just quickly pause the show, take your phone call and then resume the live TV where you stopped it.

Sky + allows you to store up to 40 hours of TV which is quite a lot in my opinion. It does tell you the amount of storage space you have left so if you are getting a bit low you can always delete the shows you've already seen to make some space.
Now, onto my minus for Sky+. The box can be a bit temperamental. Ours stopped working over Christmas (I know, shock horror) just because of a simple power cut which blew the box and is apparently quite common with Sky+ boxes. This meant that not only could we not access any Sky services we lost all of our recorded shows too. Annoying in itself but even more annoying is Sky customer service. To get an engineer out to look at the box will cost you £60. All they will then do is tell you that the box is broken and that you need another one (yes, I knew this already, the power light does not come on so obviously it's broken!!) and then when they do offer you a new box it's another £199!!

We took the step of ordering a Sky +HD box as we wanted to upgrade anyway but it was quite annoying. I've heard of lots of people who have had to replace their boxes after only having one for about 2 years. On the internet a Sky+ box is £99, however this is not for existing customers (you would think they would want to keep their existing customers happy!). All this and they did not have an engineer free until one month in the future, one month!!!! I've been finding it really hard to survive without my Sky plus

For me Sky + television is great because you get such a wide range of channels and shows. Sky offers a number of different price packages depending on what you enjoy watching. For example, a sports subscription costs £39.50 a month, a movie subscription costs £37.50 a month and a basic multi room package costs £26.25.

It's a bit costly and sometimes you find that there really is nothing to see but in my opinion Sky+ is a much better service than Virgin or Freeview and well worth the money and putting up with the customer non-service department.

Summary: Sky +