NOW

[Michael]

£25-pm sports package available for 10 months - I've just cancelled the one I bought in January early, and renewed until June 2022, all through a chatbox on the NowTV site. Very good.

[Emily Moore]

NOW have discontinued the Smart Stick, which means there are no longer any devices manufactured by Roku on behalf of Sky.

Presumably this is why NOW use third party devices such as Fire Sticks, Roku and YouView which are more likely to be used by potential customers than forking out £30 for a stripped down Roku stick.

Did anyone ever pay £30? I paid about £15 from a supermarket (I think it was Sainsbury's). NOW TV sticks seemed to always be discounted.

I have Amazon Prime, so I'm thinking of replacing it with a Fire stick.

[Neil Jones]

NOW have discontinued the Smart Stick, which means there are no longer any devices manufactured by Roku on behalf of Sky.

Presumably this is why NOW use third party devices such as Fire Sticks, Roku and YouView which are more likely to be used by potential customers than forking out £30 for a stripped down Roku stick.

Did anyone ever pay £30? I paid about £15 from a supermarket (I think it was Sainsbury's). NOW TV sticks seemed to always be discounted.

I have Amazon Prime, so I'm thinking of replacing it with a Fire stick.

Must admit the Now experience is far more pleasurable on the Fire stick than it is on my Black Now TV box.

I suspect the sticks and and the earlier boxes were sold cheaply to encourage take-up. Sky have form for discounting things when they want to launch something new, its not like they can't afford it. Of course what you pay in the supermarket is well above what Sainsbury's paid for them in the first place so I suspect they were cheap to make/reflash/rebrand.

[London Lite]

A theory I have about why Roku stopped manufacturing NOW sticks is so they could concentrate on a rumoured UK launch for the Sky Q online service, which if true would see the HDD element replaced from the standard Sky Q element to 1000 hours of cloud based storage.

[Rex]

A theory I have about why Roku stopped manufacturing NOW sticks is so they could concentrate on a rumoured UK launch for the Sky Q online service, which if true would see the HDD element replaced from the standard Sky Q element to 1000 hours of cloud based storage.

Plausible. The service was originally announced a couple of years back and only now is it finally getting some traction into being fully released to the public.

Although honestly, Now TV has reached enough users for them to consider that the boxes themselves don't have as much of a purpose in selling them as they did when they first launched it. Now is everywhere on every device these days.

And as for Sky Q, if the IP service becomes reality I would consider moving from Now to the full Sky service, especially as I can't install a dish with the current Sky service

[London Lite]

And as for Sky Q, if the IP service becomes reality I would consider moving from Now to the full Sky service, especially as I can't install a dish with the current Sky service

It's something I'd seriously consider too, although I'd probably only use it for the Entertainment channels, while keeping NOW for Cinema.

[Emily Moore]

NOW have discontinued the Smart Stick, which means there are no longer any devices manufactured by Roku on behalf of Sky.

Presumably this is why NOW use third party devices such as Fire Sticks, Roku and YouView which are more likely to be used by potential customers than forking out £30 for a stripped down Roku stick.

Did anyone ever pay £30? I paid about £15 from a supermarket (I think it was Sainsbury's). NOW TV sticks seemed to always be discounted.

I have Amazon Prime, so I'm thinking of replacing it with a Fire stick.

Must admit the Now experience is far more pleasurable on the Fire stick than it is on my Black Now TV box.

I suspect the sticks and and the earlier boxes were sold cheaply to encourage take-up. Sky have form for discounting things when they want to launch something new, its not like they can't afford it. Of course what you pay in the supermarket is well above what Sainsbury's paid for them in the first place so I suspect they were cheap to make/reflash/rebrand.

They aren't a high quality product - mine gets incredibly hot. I replaced my TV the other day and unplugged the NOW stick from the old one and was really surprised how warm it was, particularly given that it was the middle of the day and I hadn't used it since the previous night.

It seems to be a running theme with NOW products. You could fry an egg on my NOW TV broadband router, too. The hottest entertainment brand in TV!

[London Lite]

NOW are doing works on the live pause feature which will reduce it from 30 mins to 2 mins from the 7th-16th September on NOW boxes and sticks and Roku devices and Hisense Roku Smart TVs from 15th September for a month.

https://help.nowtv.com/service-status

[RegularCapital]

Although there isn't a thread for this (I don't think this justifies a separate thread for at least now), but it could likely affect NOW and Sky.

According to a TBI (Television Business International) Exclusive: HBO Max could become available in major territories in Europe including France, the UK, Germany and Italy before existing output deals with third-parties expire.

In France, WarnerMedia currently has a content deal with OCS (Orange Cinéma Séries) owned by Orange and Canal+, and as we know, Sky has the rights over a lot of HBO programming in the UK, Germany, and Italy.

https://tbivision.com/2021/10/05/exclusi...x-expands/

Knowing that Sky currently has a deal with Discovery+ and WarnerMedia is merging with Discovery, the deal could be renegotiated to have HBO Max (with Discovery+ content) available on Sky.

[London Lite]

Apparently there's been a subtle change to VOD if you don't take Boost. All VOD which was 720p/50fps has been reduced to 25fps.

[Brekkie]

I'd been holding on for Brassic at £5 a month but will be cancelling when that deal runs out. It's just a joke to fill a subscription service, already pricier than their rivals, with ads. It's even more annoying when it's the same one or two ads repeatedly when watching a series - as a matter of principle I won't be buying Persil anytime soon.

The trouble now is with so many streamers around you just have to accept you can't watch everything. Not that long ago Now TV + Netflix pretty much covered all series, but that is no longer the case and frankly having also cancelled Now TV Sport for now this week is the first time I've used it in weeks so I'm not going to pay a premium price to be a second rate customer any longer than I have too.

[Neil Jones]

The trouble now is with so many streamers around you just have to accept you can't watch everything.

Well consumers/viewers never been able to watch everything anyway. Even in the days of just two (later three) channels you'd still miss stuff, as affordable home video recorders weren't a thing until the 1970s, and that was just stuff being made/aired in this country. Once you widen the net and consider all the material made and aired in other countries that was never shown here for reasons of language/availability/crapness, its probably safe to say almost everybody has seen practically nothing.

[gottago]

I haven't had Now for long but have noticed there's a Pick show, Paranormal Captured, on the Halloween carousel. Do they normally have Pick shows? Haven't noticed any before and it's not one of their live channels.

[London Lite]

I haven't had Now for long but have noticed there's a Pick show, Paranormal Captured, on the Halloween carousel. Do they normally have Pick shows? Haven't noticed any before and it's not one of their live channels.

They've had selected shows from Pick and Challenge on NOW previously which used to be in the Entertainment Membership channel folder.

[BcastCornwall]

First time I can recall Apple advertising, in a mailshot today, the NOW app to watch Succession.