At my old house I used to have cable TV. Provided first by NTL who then got bought out by Virgin Media. In many ways they weren’t so good, however where Virgin excelled was in providing an excellent on-demand service. With the right TV package you could get instant access to the last 7 days highlights (or for some definition of) and entire series of popular programmes.

Sky can’t quite match the kind of choice Virgin can give, they just don’t have the ability to stream data on demand to an individual home. Instead they have come up with a kind of a halfway house solution. So long as you have their PVR (Sky+) you can switch on the Anytime service. You sacrifice a bunch of space on the PVR but overnight it downloads and stores programming, leaving you with a choice of maybe 10 programmes or movies to watch whenever you like.

The first downside to this is pretty obvious. All the thing is doing is just recording programmes you might want to watch while you sleep. Well I can set the PVR to record programmes I definately do want to watch while I sleep manually. But I guess maybe this will record things I wouldn’t have normally and convince me to watch something I wouldn’t normally, who knows.

Now for the next problem. Each downloaded programme comes from a tv channel, obviously. The programmes it downloads seem to just be a set list for the period, from all of the channels Sky offers. Now some of the channels Sky offers I do not subscribe to. Yet it still downloads programming from these channels. So does that mean I can get a sneak look at something from the films channel I dont normally have? No, what it means is that and entire movie that I’m not allowed to watch is taking up space on my PVR.

So basically, for the small sacrifice of losing space on my PVR I get to choose from programmes that 75% of the time I probably don’t want to watch, 20% of the time can’t watch and probably 5% of the time I have set to record myself anyway.

*all probabilities totally made up.