Advertisement
Pricing announced for Sky on Xbox 360 News
Xbox 360 News by Ellie Gibson
Microsoft has revealed how much you can expect to access the Sky Player via your Xbox 360 in the UK.
First off you'll need an Xbox Live Gold membership. Then it's £15 per month for the basic Entertainment Pack, which includes G.O.L.D., Sky Real Lives, Sky Arts 1, Sky News and MTV One.
You also get National Geographic, Nat Geo Wild, History and Eden, while for sports fans there's Sky Sports News, British Eurosport and ESPN Classic. Kids get Cartoon Network, Boomerang, Nickelodeon, Disney Channel and Nick Jr.
You can get more channels if you front up more cash each month, as follows. (All packages include the Entertainment Pack as standard.)
- £25 - Sky Sports 1 OR Sky Sports 2 + Sky Sports Xtra
- £34 - Sky Sports 1, 2, 3 + Sky Sports Xtra
- £24 - Sky Movies Screen 1 OR Screen 2
- £32 - Sky Movies Screen 1 + Screen 2
- £33 - One movie channel + one sports channel + Sky Sports Xtra
- £38 - One movie channel + all sports channels, OR vice versa, + Sky Sports Xtra
- £41 - All sports and movie channels
- From £9 per month extra - ESPN
You can also access further movies and TV show episodes via Sky's on-demand service. Some of these will be free while others will be paid for, with prices starting at £1 for a single TV show.
If you've already got Sky, you can access on-demand content for the channels you already pay for. If you've got Sky Multiroom or Sky Broadband Unlimited, you can get live channels too.
To celebrate the launch Microsoft is releasing a special bundle pack for £29.99. That gets you a three-month Gold subscription, a one month Sky Player subscription (Sky Sports Pack) and a Media Remote.
Sky Player for Xbox 360 launches today. Visit Sky.com for more info, or read our preview.
Advertisement
Want to comment on this article? Log in, or register!
Poster
|
0
"If you've already got Sky, you can access on-demand content for the channels you already pay for. If you've got Sky Multiroom or Sky Broadband Unlimited, you can get live channels too."
So I can watch certain things on the 360 for free provided I have the channel on Sky? Kind of like iPlayer streaming? Also, I have Sky Unlimited BB, are the live channels free or not? |
|
kinky_mong
27/10/09 @ 10:10
+15
Is there ever anything remotely decent on the Sky channels that would actually justify these ridiculous subscription fees?
|
|
ColdShoulder
27/10/09 @ 10:12
+21
Nuh uh. No way. £15 per month for a service that's 50% adverts? Forget it.
|
|
Ornithophobe
27/10/09 @ 10:13
+23
So you get to pay ridiculous prices and blow your connections download quota / fair use terms into the bargain ? marvelous.
|
|
alimokrane
27/10/09 @ 10:24
+5
I was really hoping that they would let us choose which channels we want to pay for. I personally only want Sky sports 1,2 and Extra.... make all individual channels available separetely for god's sake!
Edited 1 times,
most recently on 27/10/09 @ 10:25
|
|
+2
@ JahB
Terrestrial channels are not available initially and programmes will also not be shown in HD, because broadband speeds in Britain are "simply not good enough", says Sky's David Mercer. http://www.computerandvideogames.com/art... |
|
+8
So let's say a Silver LIVE user wanted this Sky Player only; Microsoft expect them to pay £30+ per annum for the privilege of being able to pay £15 per month to Sky? Does that sound right? :?
Sometimes I think this whole Gold subscription thing is just so utterly, utterly wrong and that it's Microsoft's cynical way of milking as much money out of their users as possible. I'm so glad I cancelled mine when I did and moved over to the PC for the majority of my gaming. |
|
WinterSnowblind
27/10/09 @ 10:47
+2
@cyacomini
I already have Sky, and I'm very happy with the news. It means I can watch it another room. The prices are high, but if you don't already own Sky, where you expecting it to be cheap? |
|
Britesparc
27/10/09 @ 10:48
0
I can't see me ever bothering with this, ever, at all, ever, but can you download individual episodes/movies/sports events without a Sky subscription? Say, it's a tenner or a fiver or whatever for an individual footie match or movie premiere, even without paying the £15 a month sub...?
|
|
Anthony_UK
27/10/09 @ 10:59
0
I don't get it, looking on the sky website, you can get the movies & sports pack for £25.00
Where as on the 360 its £41.00 I've not been with Sky for a while, but i'm sure they'll still have the half a dozen movie channels where as 360 only seems to have 2. Even if this is purely aimed at people who can't actually get Sky normally, why try to rip people off in this way, especially when its such a high profile add on to the 360? On demand football matches may interst me depending on the cost, other than that its an atomic facepalm to whoever came up with this pricing! |
|
+1
I downloaded the player this morning and it wasn't working, it also pointed me to a support website that was dead. The website is now working but it tells me nothing about the error code I was getting.
At any rate, now I know it needs a Gold account it's all moot as I don't have a Gold account and since I don't like playing online I'm not paying for one. You have to wonder why Sky, Facebook and Twitter bothered if they were going to be shut out from a huge number of users, just so they could be used as a means to try and squeeze a Gold subscription out of people... |
|
Wolverfrog
27/10/09 @ 11:00
+2
Who in their right mind would pay £15 a month for a Sky package which doesn't even contain as many channels as it would if you bought standard multi-room? They should make channels you can get on freeview for free.
|
|
alimokrane
27/10/09 @ 11:03
0
The only deal I can see as a good one is if they make all channels available SEPARATELY. I want to pay for what I want!
|
|
Petulant_Radish
27/10/09 @ 11:22
0
@Cyacomini
Sky does not have a large on demand service, their Anytime service is primarily used to record shows for channels you do not have to attempt to entice you to purchase them, alongside the odd large acquisition for them. As a Sky subscriber being able to access all the Sky Player on demand content via my television is, for me, a very good thing. The pricing is ludicrous, but this is Microsoft & Sky we’re talking about, they’re not exactly known for giving their consumers the best value in entertainment. An for everyone asking for a per channel basis subscription, this will never happen, as it takes away from the value of other channels to the platform. Sky need a reason for having NatGeo and all the other channels you would never normally watch on the platform so that they can get a carriage fee from them. |
|
+4
@alimokrane
Sky are never ever going to allow people to just have the channels they want to watch on a 'pick & mix' basis, on any platform. Sky make money partly by charging the channels for being on the service. if they allowed people to have only the channels they actually watched, the other channels could then say 'well, hardly anyone is watching us, so we're not going to pay you very much to carry our channel'. Sky bundles the channels together so it can go to the channel providers and say 'look at all these viewers who we are supplying your channel to. Pay us!' If it couldn't do that, it would lose a lot of money from a lot of it's channels - and the ones most people would want to watch are mostly the channels it provides itself that it actually loses money on, so there's nobody for it to charge for providing them. So no, never going to happen. Not on Sky boxes, not on sky player, not on 360. Unbundling simply doesn't make sense for Sky. |
|
Madafunkola
27/10/09 @ 11:33
+2
Did people actually think Sky would drastically undercut their core packages? If it was "cheap" they would lose customers from there main satallite services. This is an ADDITIONAL SERVICE, not a basic right to all Xbox owners. Nothing comes for free. People here are b*tching like MS are taxing them to breathe!
|
|
0
"Sky bundles the channels together so it can go to the channel providers and say 'look at all these viewers who we are supplying your channel to. Pay us!'
So no, never going to happen. Not on Sky boxes, not on sky player, not on 360. Unbundling simply doesn't make sense for Sky" You're totally right, though, this isn't a Sky/MS thing, same thing happens here in Portugal, and I bet in other countries as well. And, the same way *they* say: 'look at all these viewers" they also brag: 'look at all these channels', to the other end of the line.
Edited 1 times,
most recently on 27/10/09 @ 11:36
|
Want to comment on this article? Log in, or register!
