April 19, 2018

Sky announce Spotify on Q but still no date for HDR or "Q over web"

Sky's results for the last quarter show the familiar pattern of adding more customers and the company, in the throes of takeover talks with 20th Century Fox, announced that Spotify will be on the Q boxes by the end of the week. Remember when our TiVo boxes had a Spotify App that was so flakey and useless it was pretty much unusable? I bet nobody misses it. Spotify software can be frustrating (ever used it on an iPhone? Ever wondered where all your disk space has gone??!).  Spotify on NowTV isn't any better, but hopefully on Sky Q it will be fully functional, which would be an improvement - it could hardly be any worse.
(Personally, I prefer Apple Music to Spotify: Apple's software and sound quality are, on my systems and to my ears, superior and they pay artists twice as much as the pittance offered by Spotify. But I digress…)
Anyway, the reason I'm mentioning Sky is that there's still no date set for the arrival of Sky Q over the internet, which I know is a service of some interest to visitors to this site.
Over on Cable Forum, there's a poll asking if VM TV customers are looking to switch to the new Q web service. Here's what I contributed:
I'm a "maybe". I currently have the full VM TV (whatever that's called these days) and top it up with Netflix and the occasional month with NowTV when there's something I fancy on Sky Atlantic. I can't have a dish on the outside of my home and have never wanted to directly line Murdoch's pocket, but neither of these will be relevant in 2019. We've been NTL/VM TV customers since the late nineties.
We're under contract until next January and we are in no hurry to leave VM/Netflix as, Atlantic aside, they give us everything we want to watch at an affordable price. But I'm intrigued by the new Sky Q and when it finally launches I'll consider the price (I'm on a good deal at the moment and I'm not prepared to pay more) and reports on its reliability. Having said that, I'm more likely to drop VM TV and just use Netflix and NowTV, possibly with a Freeview recorder, than try something new and probably flakey at launch. At the moment, Mrs Nialli is very happy with our pair of V6 boxes and her Netflix/VM combo, and that's probably the biggest factor of all...
But never say never, which is why I've said 'Maybe'.