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Will Sky+ ever allow to rewind past the tune in point?
chemical2009b
Posts: 5,250 Forum Member
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Just now the earliest point you can rewind up to is the point where you tuned in. Will Sky ever invent a facility that allows you to rewind to what was on before?
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Iplayer already kind of does this on there website with the live restart option.
I was thinking along the lines of how I beleive live restart works on Iplayer. The servers have a buffer of the last few hours for each channel. You could select a program from the Tvguide and be given the option of starting from the beginning, in which case the box would connect to the servers via the Internet and stream it to your box.
You could also rewind from live tv and when you reach the end of the boxes buffer be given an option to connect and start streaming and pick up rewinding from that point. Although as you say it won't be perfectly seamless but it would be reasonable and good enough for work.
I highly doubt all channels would support it anytime soon, most likely it would be the main few channels.
It's not going to happen 'as such', and assuming it does it wouldn't be anything to do with Sky specifically - it's down solely to the individual broadcasters to make it available on-line as it's been broadcast.
I would suggest though that the UK infrastructure would need considerable upgrading to do so.
It isn't.
Take Virgin's TiVo for example. If I'm watching something on ITV, flick over to BBC News when the adverts come on, and then flick back to ITV I can rewind and view the bits I missed because, provided a tuner is spare, it will carry on caching the channel last viewed. On Sky+ I can't do that. Even if my 2nd tuner is doing nothing!
That would be a nice feature to have on Sky.
As for features like a backwards EPG the same as Freesat Freetime, Virgin TiVo and YouView, I would like to see that, but it of course depends on Sky's enthusiasm to write and roll out the software, along with the broadcasters signing up for it.
And then proceeds to explain something entirely different, which actually disproves your point
I never said it would work every time before you tuned in. But if you were watching a channel and came back to it after selecting one other it would.
TiVo will not allow you to rewind to an earlier point to when you tuned in.
Your example just shows TiVo will buffer a second channel if the tuner is spare, not record content prior to you tuning in to that channel.
I would imagine often, especially if you don't know exactly when it was on, you spend time scrolling backwards through the EPG looking for something, only to then find that it's not available anyway!
So it would need 6 cables from the dish OR 4 cables and a built in multiswitch OR 3 SCR cables from a suitable lnb OR one optical cable, an optical lnb and in built optical multiswitch. Hardly cheap or practical at present. Remember Virgin, UPC etc are cable companies and cable boxes only require one cable to feed multiple tuners whereas satellite receivers require one feed per tuner.
I think the ship has sailed now on multi tuner/centralised server boxes. The future is going to be Cloud based tuners/storage now with IP connected clients, like it or love it...!