Sky TV on its way via broadband line and the Xbox 360

There was a time when Sky TV was limited to people who would or could put up with a dish on the side of their house and that was that, but those times are changing.

From this week you can get Sky integrated onto an Xbox, complete with chatting and voting across a virtual living room, which has all your online friends in it.

That means like Microsoft has not only put Sky Player on its games console but also done some integration with the service, although the virtual living room is a common ingredient for video on Live, the Xbox online network. Sony and its PS3 may be ahead in European installations of PS3 over Xbox 360, but Microsoft has always been in the lead with its number of networked customers. The PS3 network only really got off the ground last year and won’t be getting an integrated version of Sky for a while yet. Having said that if you have a multiroom subscription to Sky at home, you can get a free online version of Sky on any device and with a little trickery can get it to play on the PS3 already, but it’s not idiot proof and it’s not integrated into the video services like it is in Live.

You still have to pay for Sky on the Xbox 360, but you can subscribe online and packages start at around £15, and you can add channels as and when. Customers have to already be paying for the Xbox Live Gold membership in order to get Sky, so the monthly price is probably more than if you have a Sky box and satellite dish. But some buildings, especially blocks of flats, often come with Virgin cable built into them and they will tolerate no satellite dishes, so for some people getting Sky through a broadband line is the only way they can do it.

As we said earlier, Sky already has an offering for multiroom customers to get Sky Player on any PC over a broadband line, but it has also just signed up a week or so ago with Fetch TV from UK company IP Vision. This offers TV channels and VoD services on a hybrid Freeview set top box and the service will start early next year, once again it’s a version of Sky Player software and needs a broadband line.

The sky channels involved in Fetch and also this new Xbox deal include Sky Sports, Sky Movies and a range of live channels, again always at a price and Sky Player be preloaded as part of Microsoft’s Windows Media Centre software on future PCs.

To make any version of Sky Player work you need a 1Mbps broadband connection or better and the stream comes in three graduated speeds, at 600Kbps, 1.1Mbps and 1.8Mbps, each varying in quality. Sky is keeping HD services purely for its satellite dish customers for now, though at some stage that could come over broadband too but only at much higher bandwidth.

The basic entertainment pack includes Gold, Sky Real Lives, Sky Arts 1, MTV ONE, Sky Sports News, British Eurosport, ESPN Classic, Sky News, National Geographic, Nat Geo Wild, History, Eden, Cartoon Network, Boomerang, Nickelodeon, Disney Channel and Nick Jr as well as the Movie Channel in VoD (on demand).