Which is doubly annoying when you consider inflation has been near zero for all that time.

I wonder when SkyQ & their 4k service comes in, that they'll stop making customers pay extra for HD... We can dream lol

Of course. But it's all about standards and these are the following that equipment today support. Ignoring the very high 120fps which is still in work.

2160p23.98, 24, 25, 29.97, 50, 59.94


I'd expect F1 to be 2160p50 but that's just a guess. it would be a bit disappointing for it to be at 25fps.

And have you been threatening to quit every year if they don't give you a discount?

Loyalty means a lot when it comes to a person's character, a friend, but I'm afraid it hasn't meant anything for a long time when it comes to utility and service companies. If you just take it on the chin they will take the piss

It's a fair question, and the answer is no, for 3 reasons really:

1 - I've had Sky since 2007 and until fairly recently I've felt it was still reasonable value. It's the rapid escalation over the last 24/36 months that has mostly pissed me off, rather than the sum total of each and every increase.

2 - It annoys me that there's an established process for people to phone up, threaten to cancel, then get great deals to stay. Now I accept that it is an established business practice nowadays in many businesses/products and that's not going to change.

But if I hate subsidising other folk because I'll continue to pay full price when they only pay half or whatever, then I'm going to hate being one of the people being subsidised because I'd think I was being hypocritical. My view is I'm either happy to pay what the normal rate is or don't pay for it at all and the recent increases have now put it on the bubble of it being not worth it any more.

(Yes, I realise that's a very naive way of dealing with companies like Sky!)

3 - I'm going to contradict myself slightly from the first point and say yes, the long term trend of it IS a concern. It's pretty much a consistent £3/4 per year that goes on it now with no relenting, and that trend isn't going to change given Sky's continual announcements of how it's massively overpaid to keep the latest set of rights for whatever sport. Even if you can get a great deal for 6 months or a year or whatever, unless you can stay on that sort of deal indefinitely then at some point in the future you're back into full price payments and annual (at the very least) increases, so a customer retention deal like that is only really postponing the inevitable.

If I thought to myself the only way to justify it was to indefinitely be on the "threatened to leave rate", it would just be another thing telling me that actually the best thing to do WOULD be to leave.

Like I say I probably need to upgrade my thinking to deal with these companies to a 21st Century style of business, which is shaft the loyal customers and bend over backwards to pander to the people threatening to leave.


And of course all the constant raising appears largely designed to be within that 10% band anyway.

These prices are definitely getting a bit steep now. If you're only interested in F1, then NOW TV appears to be a no brainer.

I do wonder if the NOW TV pricing structure will change between now and 2019.

At the moment its:

- Day - £6.99
- Week - £10.99
- Month - £31.99

Remember that the Day Pass used to be £9.99 and the Weekly Pass was £15.00. I could see a scenario where both of those go back to those prices before 2019.

https://www.change.org/p/formula-1-k...r-tv-in-the-uk

99.9% certain it would be shot 50p, if they're shooting progressively then.

When we 1st subscribed to Sky in January 2004 we were paying £66 for the whole TV package (Sports, Movies Etc....) + Multi-Screen.

Until last September we were paying around £100 for Multi-screen, Variety HD, Sports + Talk & Broadband but we ended up dropping the sports pack which took us down to £77. In December I called up & threatened to cancel & they offered us a 30% discount which took it down £57 a month, The incoming price increase will take up upto £60.

If its 4k then it will be progressive as i pointed out a page back to your post!!
4k does not do interlacing!

In comparison, I pay roughly £80 a month for practically the ultimate BT package (bar free daytime phone & sky's channels):

which consists of:
1. Free Evening & Weekends phone - £17.99 line rental
2. BT Infinity Option 2 (the faster one) - £30
3. BT TV Ultra HD (which includes all the extra non-BT TV channels you can get from them - in HD wherever possible, e.g. Eurosport etc. (but NOT the Sky Sports or Sky Movies channels - you have to pay extra for them) - £15 (I think it should be £20 but i've got £5 for some reason)
4. BT Mobile: 20GB Data, unlimited texts & minutes per month (£16 a month - part of the £85 bill) - would be £21 a month but because i'm with BT for broadband, I get £5 knocked off.

One thing i've just realised: Sky Q is split into 2 tiers: regular SkyQ and SkyQ Silver.

SkyQ Silver is the only one that will let you watch Sky's 4K channels, they've said that regular SkyQ will be HD only, so if you're buying SkyQ to take advantage of 4k, you might lose out if you get the cheapest SkyQ platform on offer.

Although it looks like (Small positive here), that you get their HD channels as standard with SkyQ! Even with the 'non-silver' version - so that's good. No more "Family or Variety" bundles or the HD pack...

Saw this new deal Sky have or going to have from the Manor facebook group and I think its just going to drive more people away from the sport. I do think F1 should be free to air, what else is there? everything it seems is going off FTA then under a pay wall. I won't be paying for Sky to watch F1 if it goes to only on there in the future. This will hurt the sport incredibly, I havent seen Indy Cars (Champ cars now isnt it?) on FTA in yonks! even though it was just highlights it had an audience at least but I lost track of that when it all went behind a pay wall and then wasnt even on as much I dont think from what people have been saying. Also other non motorsports have gone into some sort of obscurity on some channel somewhere on Sky and I bet this is how F1 will end up. There are so many deals out there though, what thing can I sign up to where I can just watch F1 for a small fee and not have to have other channels in the mix?. Obv this is for later on and not now. I do fear for the sport, much as I love my football as well I have gotten used to Sky hogging everything and just giving the scraps back to FTA but with F1 its a different story, not everyone likes it and its something I feel needs to stay in its entirity on FTA. I know this won't happen yet but good to be prepared and excuse me if I have missed a few things but I dont understand some of the jargon and last time I posted was last weekend and about 20 pages have gone on since then.

I have both Sky and Virgin. The cost of adding Sports pack in HD to Virgin's TiVo was the same as the monthly cost of the legacy HD pack on Sky therefore the way I see it is I get Sky for free while the Mrs can watch her godawful soaps and reality crap downstairs.

Way back when Bernievision started on the continent I had a horizon - horizon motorised satellite system installed with a Seca decoder which gave Canal+, Telepiu and D+ all showing F1 digital in the years before Sky took the service in 2002. After Bernie pulled the plug I got a Premiere subscription card from Germany.

On occasion you could scan and get the raw feeds and watch Jim Rosenthal & co behind the scenes in their ITV mobile studio. EBU had a (lattery encrypted) multilateral F1 backup feed on 7E and the F1 in Cinema feed in the clear on 1W 720p. North American races came in on 22W

After many years of use the 1.2m dish blew off the chimney during the storms in 2011 and smashed through the patio.

Even though Sky took up (well really it was all FOM - Sky just handled playout & the competition postal address) a UK F1Digital Service for that year, it would still have been available from Canal+, D+ etc. on the continent in 2002...

It was but paid for the season on Sky £12.99 per race until the £50 half season ticket offer was available.

Just spotted this, some classic LeMans racing from 1959 to 1961 on Sky channel 468 FrontRunner via Heyday TV from 9 until midnight tonight.

Though it's annoying that I have to pay for all of Sky Sports, which I never did when I was a Sky subscriber.

My preferred option would be a subscription to just Sky Sports F1.

Looks like TSN in Canada is taking a large amount (or possibly all) of the Sky Sports F1 output:

http://www.motorsport.com/f1/news/ts...verage-682217/

Wonder how much Sky makes out of these deals...

That's kinda like what happened to F1.

"As goes life...so goes F1" ©
Jp

Interesting in the comments someone has said 'Those poor Canadians' yet every reply is saying Sky UK F1 is awesome.

Most UK viewer's opinion of Sky's F1 coverage is probably skewed because of the antipathy the general UK public have to News Corp's companies, and also I believe TSN just got the World Feed with BBC's commentary before & no BBC pre or post-race stuff, so they probably think that the BBC's coverage in the UK was just the world feed with BE & DC alone... Which is why Sky's coverage would naturally seem a lot better to them.

If say BT had been announced as the exclusive rights holders in the UK from 2019, the reaction from the fans would have been far less severe because: We like an underdog & BT is definitely the underdog in the Pay TV wars in the UK, it's not News Corp & most people probably have BT phone or broadband anyway.

Is it just a UK thing, where we (well some!) all hate Sky, and just hate paying for anything really ! yet when other Countries (like Canada) see what SKYF1 offers, think it is excellent
I am as bad left BT for Sky as I did not like BT prices, and even with no discount Sky was the better option overall. someone said Sky as gone up 60% over the past 10 years ? but then rail fares have gone up 55% over the same period Petrol was 94p (which went up to £1.50+) although currently about £1.05 (until the summer ! ) so all in Sky no worse, and no better than many others, However I do agree that their should be a seperate F1 sub, and I am sure that if it was pitched at a reasonable cost, people would sub to it, maybe when it goes 'Sky only' in 2019 they will give this as an option ?

That's partly to do with it. Quite a lot of the British public don't have a good impression of News Corp, especially after the phone hacking scandal. Pay TV only came in to the UK around the Mid-to-late 80s, but it's only since the late 90s (when Sky Digital launched) that the impact of it started to be felt by the average viewer, especially where sports were concerned.

My perception of the Sky coverage has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with News Corp. The ownership of Sky has never crossed my mind until you mentioned it.

For me personally I've been disappointed with the Sky coverage recently - particularly last year - due to a tendency towards the tabloid, too much banter and insufficient in-depth analysis. It still has some great parts, but for me the analysis in the run up to Abu Dhabi was so much better on the BBC when compared to Sky. It's more annoying when I know how capable Sky actually are, they really can do some great programming - I just wish they'd focus slightly more with the F1. It's a good product, but in my view there is - to borrow an F1 expression - more potential to be unlocked. Just my opinion, obviously.

Have you actually seen the Sky Sports F1 coverage yourself, FOM Fan?