I was a Sky subscriber until the end of last year. Opting to terminate my contract as the price had simply gotten too expensive and the Sky Q product was simply not worth all the money.
I moved to an Apple 4K TV box and watch TV via free and paid-for streaming apps. While I have many that I regularly subscribe to, when I left Sky, I decided that I would pay for “Now” every once in a while and catch up with Sky TV occasionally. “Now” was previously called “Now TV” and is a part of Sky and is a streaming app with a monthly subscription.
The app offers various passes such as entertainment, sport, cinema, and Hayu. I just opted for the entertainment pass, and over the last couple of weeks, I have been catching up with some Sky shows like “From”, “Brassic”, and others.
While the content available is pretty good, I did decide not to regularly subscribe as I already have many app subscriptions and in my opinion it is not brilliant value price wise. At £9.99 a month for the entertainment pass, it is expensive compared to some other streaming apps and is certainly a weak offering when it comes to value for money. The app only streams at 720p and it includes ads and just stereo. This price normally gets you at least full HD and ad free with competitors. However, to get the full HD, you have to pay £6 for a bolt-on which offers ad free/full HD along with Dolby or you can pay £9 for 4K. Again not great value when competing products get you full HD at £10 and 4K at around the £18 mark. Maybe if the offering was better value for the price, I would consider permanently subscribing.
You can get a £6.99 a month entertainment pass and other offers, but you are then signed to a six-month term before the price reverts to the full charge. I opted for the full charge to give flexibility. The offer may be of use if you know you wish to keep subscribing.
While disappointing that the £9.99 offering does not at least offer full HD, this is Sky that you are really dealing with. But at least this is cheaper than a Sky contract for Sky Q or Sky Stream albeit with compromises.
The user interface of the Now app has tabs for the various passes, search functions, and the ability to watch live TV. Annoyingly, the live TV does not have its own tab, and on the main home page, you have to scroll to the bottom (at least on the Apple TV version) to select the TV guide that also allows viewing of the channels.
Watchlist functions are available as you would expect, and I have made good use of this to allow quick catch-up selection of shows that I follow. On the Apple 4K TV box, the app is generally fast, and the app itself okay apart from the access to live channels, which is always buried away.
You cannot fault a lot of the programming; however, once I have finished catching up with the current batch of shows, I will likely not subscribe again for a while. A positive though that I should mention is that they have a section of shows supporting British Sign Language as a channel called BSL.
Overall, an okay app, some good shows, but surely full HD should be part of the standard offering nowadays along with ad-free. They should then bring in a cheaper ad version like their competitors.
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