[Parsons]

think it's like £200+ for the recordable box.

IIRC there is a Sky Q package for around £10/month that basically gives you the free channels only, but allows you to continue to rent the box(es). Some have called it "Sky Q Basic" but unsure if there's an official name. There are reports that it might be tied to taking Sky Broadband. Strangely enough, there's not a lot of official information out there

I’ve seen this and I believe you are correct in that the package is only available if you have Sky broadband. 

I don’t, but i wouldn’t pay it anyway, at £10 a month the freesat box pays for itself in a couple of years,  and on the the basic package the value proposition of SkyQ is non existent.

I’ve long held the view that it was Sky Movies which made the whole thing worthwhile, when my children were little we certainly got our monies worth out Sky Movies Disney etc, but the majority of our viewing always had been on the terrestrial channels, for all those hundreds of channels I find very little to watch. 

I work 50 hour weeks on average so I don’t get a lot of time to watch tv, over Christmas when I had 2 weeks off most of watching was Disney/Amazon with a few bits on the main terrestrial channels. The only film I watched on Sky Movies was Santa Clause the movie (you know, the one with Dudley Moore) - the lineup as been pretty stagnant for a while now.

As @rdd says, this was the rise, more than the others where I took a very serious look at how much we were watching on the channels we couldn’t get elsewhere, and the only thing so far, is re-runs of Friends and Fresh Prince on Comedy Central.

[cable]

For SkyQ, there is TV Essentials - www.sky.com 

TV Essentials | Sky Help | Sky.com
Welcome to TV Essentials, our TV package providing Free to air channels with a S…
  Source: www.sky.com

[Brekkie]

I think the issue now that it isn't Sky or nothing. There is so much content out there the fear of missing out on big shows has almost gone because if you're missing something on one platform you're likely finding content to watch elsewhere - and people are happy to drop in on a service for a month or two at a later date and watch a series then rather than watch it live.

I really don't get now how Sky can justify their prices when even through NOW you can pretty much get all their core channels for probably half the price - and even that is priced significantly above where the newcomers in the market are.

[Rdd]

At least in Ireland, it’s called “Sky Q lite”, it’s €10 pm and you have to take Sky Broadband. Or maybe you don’t, if a member of the retentions team decides to offer it to you if you are cancelling. It’s hard to tell.

The Irish version still has an active sub, but with only the Irish channels activated (no Channel 4, oddly, though you can use Manual Tuning). I gather the U.K. version is different and there’s no active sub, you’re just literally renting the box.

[Parsons]

Well, yesterday was the day.... after almost a quarter of a century (I was a very early Sky Digital adopter back in the late 1990s!)... SkyQ is gone and my new FreeSat box is in.

First impressions, positive - I was expecting the FreeSat box to be slow and clunky like the old Sky Digiboxes, but it's actually surprisingly smooth, I don't mind the EPG or menu system, the only thing I'm really missing (other than All4 and Disney+) is the SkyQ remote let you program both your TV and soundbar, so I can't control the volume on my soundbar with the remote, minor annoyance though.

Other than that, happy, will save me about £400 per year and the freesat box will pay for itself in 6 months. I ended up buying from RicherSounds, for an extra £25 I got a 6 year warranty which is apparently refunded if I don't use it, so, if I keep the box that long it works out at the price of a coffee per month.

It will be interesting to see what churn Sky are getting at the moment, when I called up to cancel mine (it was supposed to cancel on the 11th April, but somehow, somebody cancelled the cancel and I got billed £52 but they cancelled it overnight and should refund me), the agent I spoke to alluded to the fact that he'd had a horrible day with people calling up about the price rises.

What also found amusing is I got a flyer pushed through my door from Sky Mobile yesterday boasting about 'no mid contract price rises' when they are one of the worst culprits lol

[Rdd]

I’ve gone to Freesat (and Now TV at a fraction of the price I was paying Sky) too, but I find the box a bit buggy I have to say. My biggest bugbear is why every time I take it out of standby it needs to show my a picture of a satellite dish and a house saying “We are setting up your satellite dish”. That screen appears for about 30 seconds or more. No other set top box I’ve ever had does that and I know it’s doing nothing to my dish, so why?

As for Now, I’m missing live pause and recording functions, but I’m also paying about one-third of the price I was paying Sky even accounting for separate Netflix and Paramount+ subs.

[Neil Jones]

I think the issue now that it isn't Sky or nothing. There is so much content out there the fear of missing out on big shows has almost gone because if you're missing something on one platform you're likely finding content to watch elsewhere - and people are happy to drop in on a service for a month or two at a later date and watch a series then rather than watch it live.

I really don't get now how Sky can justify their prices when even through NOW you can pretty much get all their core channels for probably half the price - and even that is priced significantly above where the newcomers in the market are.

In fairness to Sky you are paying not just to receive six million channels and the original content but you are also paying for the product - which is the Sky equipment. It would have been so easy to just take the money and knock out some awful, slow cheap piece of crap off the shelf that required rebooting every 10 minutes.

But they didn't. The Sky+HD boxes are (were!) made in-house by them (previously by Amstrad, until they bought them out) and there is a premium feeling to the hardware offering, even though those Sky+HD boxes (that they still support) are best part of 15 years old now and look ostensibly chunky compared to what you can get these days, but of course Live pause wasn't new when Sky introduced Sky+ - TIVO had been doing it for a while, though Sky popularised the concept.

For NOW the offering is the core channels and the on-demand, plus you can watch it on all kinds of devices. Sky? Need a dish and a piece of kit. Yes I know Sky Stream is a thing but that's just NOW on steroids with knobs on and in new packaging to boot.

[Parsons]

My biggest bugbear is why every time I take it out of standby it needs to show my a picture of a satellite dish and a house saying “We are setting up your satellite dish”.

Mine does this, and you can make it go away by going into the settings and changing the standby mode from Passive to Active. It’s on page 24 of the manual, here: www.richersounds.com 

Here’s the thing though, in doing that the box, goes from using about 1w to 10w, so I’ve left it in passive. It also sent me down a rabbit hole in that it turns out that SkyQ uses about the same amount of power in standby than it does when it’s on, around 30w which at current prices will really add up over a year. So with the freesat box should save a few quid a year on the leccy - well over £100 based on my calculation if you leave it in passive mode (and maybe even more as the box itself when its on uses less than SkyQ)

[Rdd]

I think the issue now that it isn't Sky or nothing.    There is so much content out there the fear of missing out on big shows has almost gone because if you're missing something on one platform you're likely finding content to watch elsewhere - and people are happy to drop in on a service for a month or two at a later date and watch a series then rather than watch it live.

I really don't get now how Sky can justify their prices when even through NOW you can pretty much get all their core channels for probably half the price - and even that is priced significantly above where the newcomers in the market are.

In fairness to Sky you are paying not just to receive six million channels and the original content but you are also paying for the product - which is the Sky equipment.  It would have been so easy to just take the money and knock out some awful, slow cheap piece of crap off the shelf that required rebooting every 10 minutes.

But they didn't.  The Sky+HD boxes are (were!) made in-house by them (previously by Amstrad, until they bought them out) and there is a premium feeling to the hardware offering, even though those Sky+HD boxes (that they still support) are best part of 15 years old now and look ostensibly chunky compared to what you can get these days, but of course Live pause wasn't new when Sky introduced Sky+ - TIVO had been doing it for a while, though Sky popularised the concept.

For NOW the offering is the core channels and the on-demand, plus you can watch it on all kinds of devices.  Sky?  Need a dish and a piece of kit.  Yes I know Sky Stream is a thing but that's just NOW on steroids with knobs on and in new packaging to boot.

Absolutely, and Sky’s new selling point in the steaming age is being the “content aggregator”, the one place you can find everything. And it does it very well and it’s only when you’ve left that you appreciate how good a piece of kit Sky Q is. Sky Signature as a package is becoming worse and worse value every day though, as content migrates to streaming. The kids content is all on Disney+ and Paramount+, they don’t watch linear anyway.

The problem is the price, and the steep rise that hits you in month 13 once your new customer discounts expire. Yes you can call and try and get a deal. My experience was that retentions offered me a paltry deal on my existing packages and tried to get me to drop aspects of the package I wasn’t willing to. I was offered a better deal later, via email - half price on Signature, Cinema and Sports (but still nothing off BT/Premier, the most important part of the entire package for me). By then I had already researched the alternatives and I decided to proceed with cancellation. Having to rely on player apps for the Irish channels is the worst part, of course, but the picture is fine (it’s the pre roll adverts that are most annoying). If that gets too annoying eventually Saorview is an option of course.

[Blubatt]

Well, yesterday was the day.... after almost a quarter of a century (I was a very early Sky Digital adopter back in the late 1990s!)... SkyQ is gone and my new FreeSat box is in.

First impressions, positive - I was expecting the FreeSat box to be slow and clunky like the old Sky Digiboxes, but it's actually surprisingly smooth, I don't mind the EPG or menu system, the only thing I'm really missing (other than All4 and Disney+) is the SkyQ remote let you program both your TV and soundbar, so I can't control the volume on my soundbar with the remote, minor annoyance though.

Other than that, happy, will save me about £400 per year and the freesat box will pay for itself in 6 months. I ended up buying from RicherSounds, for an extra £25 I got a 6 year warranty which is apparently refunded if I don't use it, so, if I keep the box that long it works out at the price of a coffee per month.

It will be interesting to see what churn Sky are getting at the moment, when I called up to cancel mine (it was supposed to cancel on the 11th April, but somehow, somebody cancelled the cancel and I got billed £52 but they cancelled it overnight and should refund me), the agent I spoke to alluded to the fact that he'd had a horrible day with people calling up about the price rises.

What also found amusing is I got a flyer pushed through my door from Sky Mobile yesterday boasting about 'no mid contract price rises' when they are one of the worst culprits lol

All the best to you with this. I'll be honest, when I do eventually get my own house, I am probably not going to get Sky, and instead just do what you have done. Realistically, besides the odd watch of a film during channel surfing, I doubt I will miss any of the channels that I get with Sky at home. Streaming services aren't perfect, but I do have a lot of movies backed up on a server, I have a netflix account, I've looked into getting Prime too, and I think I'd be OK with just that. The only reason we're still on Sky is because of Formula One basically being Sky exclusive (I know it isn't, but watching the races is hard to do otherwise), though with Paramount+ becoming a global partner, we may very well give up Sky in the next 5-10 years.

If I were you, you should do a follow up in a couple of weeks and let us know how you're getting on. I'd certainly be interested