Feeds
Many of us have speculated on what this might look like - the answer is simple and elegant and, apart from one bit of “cool,??? exactly what you would expect.
As the marketing people always like to say, it does what it says on the box: it records two programmes at once. When doing so you can – (a) watch either of the two programmes you are recording; (b) watch another previously recorded programme; or (c) look at the EPG (limited to 48 hours of data not 7 days), select other programmes to be recorded and look in the planner.
If you are recording two programmes, one after the other on two different channels, the system will record with the guard time on both programmes. If you have programme A and B the extra two minutes before and after the programme will now be recorded provided the Sky+ box is either in stand-by or on one of the channels being recorded.
The “cool??? bit? If you have a number of programmes and then try to set a third recording, the standard screen informs you that "to record this programme you must delete and lists one of the streams." In addition you can push the "advanced" red button to see all of the programmes in conflict on grid, giving you the chance to delete the particular programmes on either input, with the system rearranging things to your requirements.
So that is it – dual record works; you can still access the EPG while dual recording, Sky+ recorded programmes and it all seems easy to use.
What else is in this release? The only major item is "save live pause to planner". This works by alowing you to save from the initial paused moment onwards to the planner. If you have more than one programme in the buffer you can save each of them separately to the planner by rewinding into that programme.
The only question remaining is "when will we all be able to see this?" Well, so far the product has been in field trials for over 2 months and unfortunately a couple of bugs were found – not in the dual record functionality or use, but in one of the other parts of the system. As Sky see it one of the great advantages of Sky+ is its direct integration into the rest of the digibox OS and EPG; unfortunately this means that changing something in the Sky+ recording functionality could have knock-on effects in the rest of the system.
As you probably realise, Sky were pretty confident that they would have a working release software sometime ago; the September Magazine lead time was such that they were confident when that all would be well. Exactly how long it will take for the bugs to be cured and new field trials to be undertaken is unknown but sky want to deliver software that works and has the fewest possible number of problems. They know nothing is perfect but having found the problems they felt it better to fix them than to release something that they already knew needed fixes in the relative short term.
So here is the bad news - the chances are that we will not see Dual Recording in September and there is a chance we won’t even see it in October.
What else do Sky have up their sleeves coming next year? We can expect some of the following:
So that is it for now. Sky’s development team are busy working on the future developments of Sky+; in fact this release has taken so long to get through field trials that the next release of the software is already in Quality Assurance (before going to field trials). No commitments as to what is in that release but the new subtitle without going via the setup menu should be in that release.
Sky’s big campaign for Sky+ starts next month and for any of you without Sky+ there will be promotional material in this month's Sky magazine. The target this year is to sell 200,000 units and the Sky+ team seem confident that that should be achievable.
