Hello everybody
I guess this primarily applies to those members living over here in the UK. Although it man be of interest to others who might like to point out either the good bits, or the bad bits, of equipment available where they are, particularly with a view to the thing that draws most of us together here, accessibility. I have only briefly played with one of these boxes, although I’m awaiting the Sky installer coming over here any day now to install mine. I decided to upgrade my box from the old Sky Plus HD box because I discovered that I was being charged 24 percent more of my monthly subscription because of the fact that I was out of contract, and because I owned my own box rather than having one on loan from Sky. I was particularly annoyed about this because I have been a loykl Sky customer since 1995, before digital television even started broadcasting over here. That event did not in fact heppen until October 1998. I was one of the first's group of customers to voluntarily switch from the old Astra annalogue sattelites to the current Sky Digital ones. In some ways, I regretted that move, because I lost access to a lot of services that I got as a bonus. By having an ellivation and rotary ratator system on my satellite dish, I found a lot of interesting things to listen too, including broadcaster uplinks. you were fantastic things in those days, as I used to be able to listen to the Saturday football commentaries live, instead of waiting for the official recorded broadcasts late in the evenings. But I digress. What I really wanted to talk about was the new Sky Q box, particularly in comparison to the new Virgin 6 hub. I don’t have hands-on experience of the latter, so I would be most interested to know the thoughts of anybody who has. The Sky Q box will bring me quite a lot of new features that I don’t have now. For instance, it has high-speed giganet wired network suppolt, as well as dual-band 2.4 and 5.0 GHz support. It also has at least one USB3.0 port and, I think, possibly 1 USB3.1C port which, I presume, can be used to stream from other sources. The model I’m getting has a 2TB hard drive, most of which can be used to record at the user level. I’m not sure, but I believe that it can record up to 4 simultaneous channels, whilst viewing a fifth channel. But I’m not sure how many LNB inputs that requires. The remote controls are quite interesting. I am given to understand that the standard remote is touch-sensitive, and also has voice search and Bluetooth 4.0 support. Although from what I’ve seen, ּthe’s no support for speech support from the box itself which is a little disappointing. However, to be totally fair, there are quite a few Sky and Sky Q apps available for Android and ios which obviously overcome this limitation to a degree. But I don’t think these give you full access to all menu functions. That’s something I’ll find out in the next few days. I have my new viewing card, so it won’t be long now. Anyway, anybodth else care to comment on any of this, regardless of where you live. It would be interesting to know about how things are with accessibility in modern equipment overseas as well. Next yes one of the things I hope to look at is an Android television. Although I need to make sure it is compajible with my Samsung sound bar, which I have no plans to change.
