Streaming sevices

[Harrison]

Since the dawn of Netflix TV streaming service how grown and we now have loads to choose from.

And with the recent rollout of Full Fibre a fast stable broadband connection is easily possible for most in the UK now to be able to stream in HD and 4K without any buffering.

Do you use any streaming services? And which ones?

[Harrison]

I love the on demand nature of streaming services, Being able to just access everything without needing to load a DVD or record something from TV. But we are also at the mercy of the streaming services to keep the content online. It's common for most services to remove and cycle content every 6 months, so a film or series can just vanish or jump to a different streaming service. And even with all of the content available there are a lot of films and TV series that are not included with the subscriptions, Often instead trying to make you buy a film or episode.

Amazon Prime video is probably the worst for this. Prime has some good content but a lot of films are not included. Sky TV also seems to have far less included in their monthly subscriptions these days as everytime I search for films a lot of them are only in the Sky Store.

I much prefer Netflix, Disney+ and Apple TV as everything shown is included. If it's on there you can watch it. There are a few exceptions where Apple and Disney have offered early paid access to a new film, but it's rare.

I upgraded from Sky Q to Sky Steam last year. I had been looking at it for some time since it launched but had been using Sky Q since launch and liked the recording ability and didn't want to lose that. Plus I watch F1 and always recorded the races when out to watch later or to fast forward through the boring bits, so I was a bit skeptical about how Sky would handle F1. But then last year I wanted to get 4K into multiple rooms, Sky Q doesn't support that. And the version of Android my Philips Smart TV has so longer supports some of the separate streaming services such as Apple which was annoying, So I finally bit the bullet and upgraded to Sky Steam. I had a few network connection issues when first using it and had to swap the router for a new one which solved the issue.

If you don't know what Sky Stream is, it's the new system by Sky TV. The Astra satellites they use for Sky Q are coming to the end of their life so Sky are embracing Full Fibre instead and streaming content over satellite broadcasts and local recordings. So with Sky Steam all the live TV channels are streamed over your internet connection and instead of recording programs to watch later you link all your streaming services to your Sky Steam box and it then you bookmark a program in your playlist to watch later. It then streams it from whereever service has it. And it actually works pretty well. There are times where a program refuses to stream or something odd happens and needs you to reboot the Sky puck, but 99% of the time I works very well. And Sky have done a very good job of merging all the different streaming services into a single UI, It's not as nice as the old Sky Q interface, and you can't customise or move anything around, so you have to just get used to how it works, but on the whole it's good.

Setting Sky Steam up is a bit tedious because if you don'rt log into every service it can't bookmark programs into your playlist to watch later. So you have to log into iPlayer, ITVX, More4, 5, U and all the other free streaming services to have them all accessible and be able to bookmark them as if you were recording them. It also adds content from any subscriptions you have to Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV, Disney+ etc that you have. I've used an Apple TV box, quite a few Smart TVs, and a few other streaming boxes from NowTV, Roku etc and the Sky Steam Puck is definitely the best all on one system that brings it all together. Most other streaming boxes either focus on their own content, such as Apple, or you have to manually jomp in and out of each service on them,

Sky are also adding more Steaming services to be included within the Sky subscription, so you don't have to subscribe to them separately, You can already get Netflix, Paramount+ and Discovery as part of Sky, and this month they are adding Disney+, with Hayu and HBO Max following soon. This is good because with all the different streaming services everything is getting fragmented. I originally got Sky a very long time ago to have everything in one place, so they are finally starting to pull all the content back into one place. It still leaves Apple and Amazon Prime separate but that's OK.

[Harrison]

Apple TV+

When his first launched it was hard to see why or what Apple was doing. They didn't have much content and it was being given away free to iPhone owners (you still have 3-6 months free with a new phone). it seemed a bit of a fad just to try and get into the streaming market. And the UI was rubbish too.

Moving forward I've been pleasantly impressed. Apple tend to only have their own content so that amount to watch is far less than other streaming services, but Apple have been investing a lot in their production filming studios and it shows. All of the shows have been very polished and if you are a SciFi fan there have released some amazing series.

For All Mankind
Severence
Silo
Monarch Legacy of Monsters
Slow Horses
Invasion
Foundation
H/Jack
Smoke
Murderbot
etc

It's not a service that's worth keeping all year. I pause it when there is nothing new worth watching. I reactivated tit for Slow Horses and the next series of For All Mankind is about to start. But the big shows they create a IMO well worth it, such as Silo.

[Tiago]

I have Netflix HD and Disney.
Had HBO with a friend but we cancelled it.
Netflix for me is the best one in terms of navigations. Rewind and forward work much better then other streaming platforms.

[Harrison]

That's a good point about rewind and fast forward. Both Amazon and Disney are really bad at this. DIsney always forgets exactly where you were if you come back later and restarts a long way before where you ended. And it jumps too quickly or not enough when fast forwarding. Amazon just messes up half the time. Disney gets stuck when it starts streaming a film sometimes too.

Apple is pretty good for remembering where you were and moving back and forth through.

I also hate the search in a lot of the different services. Why can't they all decide on the same or similar search system? Some even put the on screen keyboard in alphabetical order too. That's one nice feature of Sky Steam as it has Voice search that actually works most of the time. In contrast the voice search built into my TV is useless,