SKY+ - Never watch an advert again! (Sky Plus (Sky+))

Member Name: SilkCutSilver

Product:	Sky Plus (Sky+)
Date:	05/02/09 (26 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Record everything you want to watch

Disadvantages: You can only record two channels at once

I have never had SKY TV before - I'm not a huge TV watcher, I tend to like specific shows like Spooks and Hustle, Gossip Girl and Skins, rather than watching TV all the time. At one point I even had no TV for a year - and I was quite happy. I have had freeview in all the houses I have lived in for the last few years and found it fulfilled all my needs. However when we moved into our new property just over a year ago we discovered a disaster - there isn't strong enough signal in our area to watch Freeview.

I think usually (on an analogue signal) the picture would simply have been fuzzy - but with digital TV it made the picture jump and flick on and off. Most frustratingly it did it randomly (or every time a plane went over as we theorised) usually it was perfect during some rubbish you didn't want to watch. After 6 months of this, trying signal boosters and all sorts we took the plunge and decided to get SKY.

At the time there was a deal on for SKY TV with SKY+, Phone and Broadband. The SKY Box itself was £75 but the connection was free. This saved us money on our existing broadband contract so we went for it and treated ourselves to the SKY+ box - as I work long hours I thought it would be really useful to have.

How wrong I was - I could not have imagined how important the SKY+ now is to my life! I don't even watch 'live' tv these days - I just handpick what I want from all the channels on SKY+ and watch that!

Really fabulous features like Series link ensure we never miss our favourite shows, and being able to fast forward through the boring adverts is amazing.

The fact that I can log into the SKY website from work and set my box to remote record shows is invaluable - I often find myself browing the things i want to record for the week online and doing it like that. You can also text to do this but although I signed up I have never used it - the website is enough for me.

You can record two things at the same time but one limitation is that you have to be watching one of them. This is sometimes annoying when I want to record two things while I am at work and my flatmate wants to watch something else.

There is an awful lot of rubbish on TV these days, and before SKY+ I spent a huge amount of time on ITV.com and iPlayer trying to watch my favourite shows, but this isn't a great picture and usually on my tiny laptop. having the SKY+ just makes life so much easier!

Summary: Invaluable for a busy lifetsytyle