Sky Anytime Plus
Sky's new video on demand service: Anytime+
I've never considered Sky Anytime to be much cop, they mostly send me stuff I have no interest in. However, I am pleased to see that Sky are now offering a video on demand service to its HD subscribers.
Set up is quite simple, use some cat5/rj45 eithernet cable, plug one end into the ethernet port of the HD receiver and the other into your Sky router. You'll notice from the previous sentence that you do indeed need Sky HD and Sky Broadband (Max/Unlimited), the software version of your receiver also needs to be 'Darwin'
Unfortunately this new service is not available to all and as of March 2011 it has only been rolled out to Amstrad and Samsung receivers. No news so far as to when it will Pace HD receivers.
If you own one of the early Thomson boxes the bad news is that it cannot support the Darwin software, Sky are in the process of sending out letters to owners of these offering a free 500gb HD receiver in exchange, or for the reduced price of £149 you could have the 1TB Sky HD receiver.
You can follow Sky Anytime+ on Twitter: @SkyAnytimePlus
More about Darwin
Project Darwin was undertaken by Sky/NDS to completely re-write the Sky software and EPG, it is Linux based and is actually called Fusion. Although this probably means the software will be more stable there are already reports of bugs. For users of SkyCopyPlus there is a wait while they re-develop their software to work with Darwin/Fusion.
How to know if you have Darwin:
- Under System Details, the version number starts SYSF
- Sky Anytime shows as thumbnails rather than a list
- A Network option appears under 'Setup'
