Sky Q Review: An Installation story & genuine world Impressions
best from its introduce we reckoned the new sky Q system sounded like just what we needed at the Automated Home so we put our purchase the very first day it ended up being saatavilla. It’s been 10 days because it was installed, so is this the 21st Century TV experience we were expecting or is everything a bit of a let down?
Asennus
Our engineer turned up around 9:30am as well as was perturbed to hear we were a BT Web house. The next 5 minutes were spent on the trials as well as tribulations of a sky installer particularly on exactly how it works fine with sky routers however whatever else is a “lottery.”
When I discussed we wished to by-pass the whole wireless thing completely and go the hard-wired path with the builtin Ethernet ports he admitted he had no concept exactly how to set that up or even exactly how a LAN worked.
Worst of all he told us he was only allotted 85 mins to do our entire system – in shape new meal as well as LNB, set up the primary sky Q Silver box as well as 3 sky small boxes, carry out software application updates etc. He’s expected to do 7 installs a day!
The engineer was a excellent guy, he worked very fast replacing our near 20-year-old rusty meal with a new one (normally you only requirement to modification the LNB for sky Q). The new set up was evaluated at the LNB as well as then once again at the end of our cable televisions – all eco-friendly lights.
The sky Q Silver Box
Our old Sky+ 1TB box was eliminated as well as the skinny new Q DVR slid into its location under the Mac small as well as Sonos. It looks great in black although you can skin it in a range of ways. keep in mind if you are upgrading from an existing sky system you will no longer have gain access to to the recording or season passes on your old box. Our engineer told us he hadn’t fitted any type of of the routine (non-Silver) Q systems.
The Silver box is the brains of the whole operation as well as from what we can discover out its 12 tuners are shared out across the house to the other gadgets something like this:
4 Tuners for Recording
1 Tuner for online TV on the Silver Box
2 Tuners for online TV or Recordings on the Minis
2 Tuners for online TV or Recordings on the tablet App
1 Tuner for the TV Guide
1 Tuner for PIP on the Silver Box
1 Tuner for future utilize (4K?)
Its 2TB’s can store as much as 350 hours of HD TV (there’s around 300GB reserved by sky for other uses). round the back there’s a S/PIDF optical audio out however full Dolby digital audio is offered over the HDMI cable television now. There are a couple of USB ports as well as an HDMI IN for future use.
The Silver box will get a software application upgrade to enable Sky’s 4K service coming later this year (50fps 2160p UHD output utilising HDMI 2.0 as well as HDCP2.2). The non-Silver Q box as well as the small boxes will stay at 1080p. I’ve discovered some routine sky channels have very, shall we state ‘average’ photo high quality these days. I don’t understand much about exactly how these things work however it makes me question is sky compressing channels even much more to capture the maximum out of each transponder, making space for the 4K channels?
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The UI
Things are extremely different here, mostly for the better. The UI has a much much more contemporary feel and it looks truly bright, crisp as well as sharp. The old Backup button has gone as well as you mainly requirement to utilize the left arrow for equivalent action, plus the new reject button.
The development Bar I had on my TiVo 15 Years back Makes it to sky at Last
You can view recent recordings, or listing them A-Z. Stupidly though ‘New’ season shows all appear under N rather than the proper letter.
It’s simple to see what’s downloading (box sets, purchases as well as on-demand) as well as you can quickly pause the queue. Un-deleting products is a breeze as well as is choosing up from where you left off on your shows from the My Q section. The ‘For You’ section of My Q is expected to suggest shows however after 10 days it still states it’s discovering what I like.
One genuine inconvenience is that the Home button takes you to the ‘Top Picks’ section rather than the TV guide all of us want to see.
Keeping the entire household pleased – 4 recordings at 9:00pm
There’s an inconsistency between the apps as well as the TV UI as to exactly how the season pass is represented that might confuse newcomers. On the app it is represented with a circle around the R, as well as by a eco-friendly bar with arrows at each end on the TV.
If you have episodes of a show from a number of different seasons, helpfully they are now split as well as shown in separate folders.
After just a few days of utilize I truly like the new UI.
The Remotes
The primary Q box includes 2 remotes, a routine IR one as well as a new Bluetooth touch one. I’m typically an advocate for all the most recent tech, however I’m still undecided on the swipey bluetooth sky Q touch remote. It takes a bit of getting utilized to, for example you may feel you can press the top, bottom as well as side of the touch pad to navigate screens but there’s only one result of pressing the pad – choose – whatever else needs to be a light swipe.
Like the new Apple TV remote, if you touch the swipe pad the wrong method when choosing it up you can quickly jump away from your location during playback. In addition to having to train your muscle mass memory to utilize this new remote you likewise have to switch back to the old button method when utilizing the other style of remote on all the small boxes in the bedrooms. Hmm. You can purchase the Bluetooth remote for your mini’s as well if you like it (£40) however if sky desired us to get utilized to this remote they ought to have supplied them for all the boxes. On the upside Bluetooth implies it works without being directed directly at the box as well as even works in adjoining rooms.
There’s a devoted browse button to discover your shows as well as recordings, however it’s a bit of a chore to essential in text. It will be much simpler when the phone apps show up as well as a voice browse function is because of be turned on in an upcoming software application update (Bluetooth remote only).
TIP: Although not promptly obvious, the sky logo at the top of each remote is really a button that takes you directly to your recordings which is extremely useful.
Sky Q Mini
From the primary sky Q box your online channels as well as recordings are sent through IP either over WiFI or in our situation wired Ethernet, to the sky small boxes around the home.
The Silver bundle includes a single small box as well as we purchased 2 much more for a total of three. currently there’s no self-install choice for these minis so you’ll pay a £50 installation charge on top of the £99 expense of each box if you purchase much more after your install.
You can have 4 minis on one Q Silver system, (none on the non-Silver Q box) however you can only utilize 2 simultaneously. This seems a unusual restriction as you are able to utilize 2 tablets in addition to the 2 minis, although presumably they utilize a lower bit rate. ideally this limit will be unwinded in the future as in our home we certainly have times where all 3 boxes might be utilized at once. For now you get a message when the maximum number are in utilize as well as you have to get a household member to switch theirs to standby to let you utilize yours – or view on a tablet instead.
Up up until now we have always distributed our sky around the home utilizing the RF modulator developed into the old Sky+ Box, so to all of a sudden see sharp 1080p on our bedroom telly is fantastic.
The sky Q small box under the telly – F1 in HD in the Bedroom!
The Mini’s remotes are quickly configuration to manage your TVs volume. Other helpful features include pressing the house button to turn on your TV in addition to the box as well as a long press of the standby button to turn your TV off too.
The UI to select your channels as well as recordings on the minis is similar to the primary box. A good enhancement right here would be to enable each small to filter its own recordings.
Fluid seeing is Sky’s marking moniker for pausing your telly in one space as well as choosing it up in one more as well as this works well.
If you’re a sky Broadband customer, then each small box becomes a wireless gain access to point (2.4GHz as well as 5GHz b/g/n/ac) broadening the protection of your WiFi utilizing this AirTies fit together network. If (like us) you have a different broadband supplier then this function is disabled.
The system likewise has builtin Powerline Networking hardware to send your AV packets across your mains wiring, however strangely this is currently disabled.
Tablets & Apps
You can view online channels as well as your recordings with the sky Q app on an iOS or Android tablet. This works excellent in our home as well as now it’s simple to take sky to the bath!
Sky TV guide on our Lenovo Android Tablet
Rights administration problems rear their unsightly head right here though. try to view a BBC on demand show on your tablet as well as you’ll get a message telling you that you can’t do that. however record the exact same show yourself instead of downloading it as well as it plays fine. Siis mitä? The BBC only want you to view on-demand from their own iPlayer app. That’s just nuts Auntie.
You can copy shows to your tablet to view when you are away from home. I was able to verify from my router web traffic that shows sent from my sky Q box to my tablet were actually downloaded from the Web instead of coming across my LAN. It appears like your recordings are truly sent from the Sky Go platform to your tablet so it’s worth checking you have lots of data (or as well as limitless bundle) with your house broadband contract.
The apps likewise disable the choice to output the tablets display to a TV. So you can’t get round the 2 TV mini limit by hooking up your iPad or Android tablet to your telly.
There’s currently no phone app for sky Q, although they are verified for release sometime later this year. For now you can utilize the old Sky+ app to routine recordings as well as catchup downloads, however you cannot see your planner or view online TV or recordings like with the tablet app. It seems a pity that sky couldn’t have had the phone apps prepared for the introduce of the system, all of us bring a phone, not a tablet. It’s one more indicator that sky Q has been introduced before being completely baked.
So far there’s no method to view sky Q on a PC or Mac (the method you can with sky Go) as well as no word if that’s coming later. personally I’d far rather view on my MacBook than a small tablet screen with a wheezy speaker.
Early Verdict
In the end our engineer spent well over 2 hours on our installation. That’s without any type of of the wireless pain that numerous of his other installs entailed. Sky guarantee Q clients a special experience, however they’re putting far as well much pressure on their difficult working engineers, because of both lack of training in addition to providing them as well bit time to do a great job.
It’s still extremely early days for Q as well as many of the problems discussed on their forums are associated to WiFi problems. however we’ve not seen a single problem utilizing Q through the great old CAT5 cable televisions we buried in our walls in 1999.
Like many similar tech products released, sky Q is a bit of a work in development at launch. There are great deals of bit improvements that requirement to be made, however I’ve no question numerous of them will come over time.
There are other features right here we haven’t even got into like Airplay as well as Bluetooth music playback.
It’s a pity sky won’t enable apps like Netflix as well as Amazon Video on the Q as well as Mini’s which would make this the only system many of us would ever need.
Pricing is a bit opaque however sky state the common continuous monthly expense for existing Sky+ clients will be around £12 additional (as it was for us), while new clients can g
