Sky Player

The Sky Player service has been around for several months, allowing users to view Sky channels on their computers.

It has now been expanded so that owners of Xbox 360 consoles can use those to view it too.

A Sky Player subscription is required – for £15 a month this provides access to 17 basic channels such as Gold, National Geographic, ESPN Classic, Sky Arts and Cartoon Network. It’s possible to add Sky Sports for an extra £19 or Sky Movies for an extra £17.

The full package is £41 per month, including access to on-demand television and films. It’s not cheap – in fact it’s almost as expensive as a Sky satellite subscription – but if you’re a Sky Multiroom customer or have the most expensive Sky Broadband package, there’s no extra charge to use Sky Player. Those customers will get access to the channels to which they subscribe.

On the Xbox the service is good, after some early hiccups when it started were ironed out. Quality is just about up to the standard of normal television, and it’s easy to control using the Xbox controller (a separate remote control is available as an upgrade). Quality will depend on how good your broadband connection is.

There’s a ‘party mode’ in which you can invite friends to watch with you – your icon and theirs are shown in a room watching a TV screen and you can talk using an Xbox headset if one is attached to your console.

One slight annoyance is that you need to have an Xbox Live Gold subscription to use the service, adding up to £40 a year to the cost of the service if you don’t use have one already – for those who don’t use their consoles for online play it’s an extra cost to factor in.

The same login details can be used to access Sky Player on the web or through the Xbox 360. It’s a good service that works well, but the price is a big sticking point. Unless you aren’t able to install a Sky dish on your property, the dish might be the better option, at roughly the same price.