After over 9 years using SKY TV, I finally got round to cancelling the subscription. I did do a half-hearted cancel back in 2018 just to get a price reduction down to below £20 pcm, but annual price increases pushed that up to £49 by last April, and would take it over £50 this April. The only reason I’ve justified staying with them is for the convenience of recording and being able to pause live TV.
But, over this past year, there’s very little I’ve been recording, live viewing is mostly news channels, and Mel just watches mainly Filipino channels on Youtube. So now we’re back to good old Freeview via aerial, and don’t feel any deprivation. The LG TV has an app for Youtube which works fine, and picture quailty is as good as SKY. They do want me to return their box, but we’ll see if that’s just words…; and we can keep the satellite dish, although I can’t see us bothering to make use of it for Freesat or whatever. The other thing, of course is that SKY might well pull satellite service altogether, and just use internet streaming.
In fact, we do use streaming extensively now. Obviously for Youtube, but I can pick up all I would have recorded via Usenet, and I use IPTV to get all the sports channels I ever need (along with another 49,000 channels…) to watch on TV or PC for just £4 a month… How weird all this would have seemed back in the day…