Sky Broadband

Bwahaha, this post was supposed to be about my experience with Sky's latest wheeze, providing Movies and Sport for download and viewing on your computer, but, as you will see, it didn't really turn out as planned.

You can read all about this new service (free to Sky Cinema and Sport premium channel subscribers) here but you may be better reading the full post first (it may change your mind about investigating it).

Read more...

Basically, you sign up for an account, Sky check the details and confirm if you're eligible and to what content you can receive. Your computer must run WindowsXP and have Media Player 10 installed and a 1Mb minimum connection is recommended. You then install Sky's software (P2P downloading application) weighing in at a 49.6Mb download. During the install Microsoft's .NET Framework 1.1 will be installed if required. Once you've rebooted the software should be ready for use.

Enter your newly created username and password and begin the journey into the future of entertainment content delivered directly to your computer on demand... unless you get an error message saying there's a problem with your DRM licensing... I did.

Obviously Sky don't want you copying the delivered films and sport clips. They've utilised Microsoft's Digital Right Management software with Media Player 10. You can only view the files on that one computer with Media Player 10 and a DRM license. The license lasts for 30 days before the file is then rendered unplayable requiring a new download. All very well and understandable (obviously there are ways to strip the DRM protection, that's illegal... but you knew that ;-).

Sky's software kindly pointed me to a Microsoft Knowledge Base article detailing the steps required to resolve the issue. There then followed some high end geek info involving backing up hidden system files, hacking the registry, downloading various files etc etc. Best of all was the warning that I may need to repurchase existing DRM licenses for any previously downloaded content... hahaha, as if. Needless to say it didn't solve the issue. Borked, this install is.

A little further digging around the depths of Microsoft's "knowledge" base and it appears that WindowsXP has deliberately prevented me from installing and playing any (legally) DRM encoded files because of numerous changes to the hardware configuration of my machine. They helpfully point out that this behaviour is "as expected" but the page detailing how to fix this is broken, hahaha... shambles. I'm quite proud of the fact my machine can't run DRM protected files.

So, what to do? Uninstall Sky's software of course, and Windows Media Player 10 and .net framework and be happy. It's just not worth the hassle. Thankfully I only wanted to see how the service worked, what was available, how long the downloads were, video compression quality etc. I refuse to take Microsoft's advice of rolling WindowsXP back to a point before any hardware changes. What a load of pish. I'll stick to renting my DVDs, and recording TV to my hard disk. DRM, the future?... bwahaha. Let it die.

Category:

• Sky
• TV
• Broadband