So whilst going through the RSS feed today a few places mentioned Sky have started delivering movies via broadband. So I registered this evening. Registration is reasonably simple although you will need your Sky viewing card number. Once you confirm you are a customer you get prompted to create an account. The account will need a password which has at least one number in it, this is not made clear. One 49.6Mb download later and I thought I was ready to go. I installed the software, ran it, logged in and was promptly told I needed to update. The update downloaded automatically and I was prompted to install it. Finally I got the software started.
The client application is flash based and rather slow to login and download information. Once your login is authorised you are presented with a choice of channels, Movies and Sport (I assume this depends on your subscription details). Not being that interested in sport I selected movies and was presented with
a featured download (Layer Cake) and a list of genres to browse. Oh, and a nice advert for Intel Centrinos. To download a movie you click "View Details" and click download. The details view also has links to movie web sites and the ability to search for other movies by the same director or featuring the same actors.
Once the download starts the problems begin. It's a P2P application under the hood, and not a well behaved one. The amount of bandwidth it sucks is swallowing all my available bandwidth and there appears to be no way to tune it. I only realised it was P2P when I was trying to work out why nothing was downloading. The P2P system needs port 8080 open incoming, which I had blocked at my firewall. Again there appears to be no way to configure the incoming port. "Best" of all the P2P aspect runs as a Windows Service, kservice, described as the Delivery Service Manager. Once you exit out of the browsing application the transfers keep going. And going. And start again after you reboot. Before you log into your machine. And there is no visible indication of this anywhere, unless you start the front end application again (waiting for 5 minutes to login because kservice is now taking all your bandwith) and looking at your queue. I have no idea if there will be a ratio on the uploads to your fellow peers, if you are on a limited bandwidth service where you get charged by the Gb then Sky By Broadband is not for you, as you have no control.
Sky estimate that a 1 hour film will take 1 hour to download. Those of you who know how P2P works will know this is a hard claim to make. It's been over an hour now for me since I finally started a download and I have 6% of a 110 minute film. If you were expected to download something a few hours before you caught a plane, forget it, plan days in advance.
How is the video and DRM experience? I'll let you know once it completes downloading, if it ever does. I had to turn the P2P service off to get enough bandwidth back to do something useful tonight.
[12-01] Update : Andy Ward suggests using NetLimiter to control the bandwidth available to content delivery service and this works very well. Thanks Andy
The delivery service, which appears to be written by Kontiki Inc scatters itself in two places, c:\program files\kservice and c:\windows\kdx. As well as installing a service it also adds a Run entry for c:\windows\kdx\khost.exe. I had tried setting the service startup type to Manual last night and rebooting, however once khost intialises it will start the service. Uninstalling the Sky application leaves the delivery service behind, not good. Looking at the
Kontiki help pages they talk about an entry in Add/Remove programs for "Delivery Manager"; this doesn't exist. They also talk about system tray icons so I am concluding that it was a choice by Sky to install the P2P service in a vague "stealth mode".
Of further note is the actual Sky application itself; a Microsoft .net application, hosting a flash movie and Windows Media Player. Folks, either choose .net or flash, layering both feels like overkill.
I should note that Sky actually do tell you it's a P2P application in the Terms and Conditions;
If you download and save content to your computer system (a "File"), during the license period for the relevant File, we may upload parcels of content from the File from your computer system for the purpose of transferring Files to other users of the Service.
and surprisingly they're also upfront about what data will be transmitted to them
During the installation process for the Sky by broadband Application, we will detect and store the machine name, KontikiNodeId, CPU, PC bios, videocard, network card and IDE Controller information specific to your computer system, for the purposes of identifying your computer system and your eligibility to access and use the Service each time you log-in to the Service.
Now if only my download would finish I could comment on the video quality...