The reason I signed up for the Xbox 360 version of Sky Player, was mainly because I was annoyed having to plug a laptop into my TV to watch missed episodes of shows from Sky One. I had naturally thought that any content that was available on the PC version of Sky Player would be available on the Xbox version of Sky Player right? No!

It looks as though Sky has to obtain separate broadcasting rights to broadcast most of the Sky One content on the Xbox version of their Sky Player service. It kind of makes you realise just how much production companies tie down their content. To me using Sky Player from an Xbox compared to a PC makes absolutely no difference its just a question of convenience to me. The only difference to me is one is mainly connected to my TV and the other isn't. To production companies it makes a big difference to them, there appears to be a distinction between providing the same content on a TV set as apposed to on a device that is not connected to a TV. Apparently this distinction is very important to production companies when it comes to revenues they can sell the online rights to one company for a region and the TV rights to another. In my case it looks as though Sky hasn't yet obtained those rights for the Xbox Sky Player. Its a shame there is such a distinction between the two, it can at times be infuriating when all you want to do is watch a show you missed on your TV screen instead of your PC screen.

 

Email from Sky below

 

Dear Mr Street Thank you for contacting Sky Help Centre. Unfortunately at this moment in time you will be unable to access Sky 1 content on the Xbox. The reason behind this is that we do not have the broadcasting rights to show this content on the Xbox as yet. We will be able to broadcast this sometime in the future however we cannot put a timescale as to when this will be. I apologise for any inconvenience that this may cause you. Kind regards [name censored] Sky Help Centre

I finally managed to get onto Skyplayer for the Xbox 360 today after a few hiccups with the service yesterday was keen to see how good it was. Having used the Skyplayer service from my PC for many months now I was expecting Skyplayer for Xbox 360 to be almost identical when it came to content. Being an existing Sky Subscriber and Xbox gold member I was able to get access without to much problem, however I did start adding up the costs in my head as I used the service (more about this later).

Anyone who is not a SkyPlayer user or a Sky Subscriber will instantly fall in love with the service if you are a regular Sky subscriber its basically a limited Sky box with on demand content. It gives you 24 channels to watch live however none of these channels are any of the channels I would normally watch on Sky and was a bit disappointed they didn't stream Sky 1 and Sky 2 on there. If you are not a Sky subscriber the service will cost you £38 a year for an Xbox gold membership and then for the basic Sky package £15 a month or £32 a month for the full package. Its a bit expensive in my book, because getting a traditional Sky box with satellite dish for a £32 a month subscription gives you a hell of lot more including channels such as FX, Sky 1, Sky 2, Virgin 1 etc. If you are a Sky Subscriber but don't have Sky Broadband or a multi room subscription it appears you won't get much of the live content. Luckily for me I have a Sky Multi room subscription.

My main usage for the SkyPlayer Xbox 360 service was to catch-up on shows I missed on Sky, such as Lie to me and NCIS: Los Angeles because my Sky+ box is very selective on what it actually chooses to record these days. So I scrolled through the menus using my Xbox controller to the Sky 1 on demand section only to find it only had two categories "Reality TV" and "Chat Shows" what!? Maybe they had removed them? So I logged into the PC version of Sky Player to see if I got anything different. Sure enough I got all of the other categories under Sky 1 on demand "Reality TV", "Chat Shows", Action, SC-FI and Drama. Why hadn't Sky made these available on the Xbox version of Sky Player? Maybe it was something to do with what machine was considered the master? But there was no way to make the Xbox master.

Then after a while the service started to fail on the Xbox, I decided to check it on the PC and I got the following error in my browser.

 

Service Unavailable - DNS failure

The server is temporarily unable to service your request. Please try again later.

 

Had Sky miscalculated how much bandwidth they would need? Surely not? The BBC iPlayer is incredibly popular and I have never seen it suffer such performance issues before how could Sky? I am sure they would have taken all of this into account. I must say its quite disappointing In the states services like Hulu seem to run okay and they are served via the Xbox, what could possibly have gone wrong?

It seems as though today's highly anticipated Sky Player service for the Xbox 360 got off to a bit of a shaky start. It launched at 10am this morning with some good early indications, but by time I had got home to try the service on my Xbox it was displaying an advert on Xbox Live stating it was coming later today, the advert eventually disappeared. So what happened?

Well it appears according to Neowin some users were suffering issues streaming content. Microsoft have taken down the service because of "an unforeseen technical issue"  and it appears the decision was made to protect the quality of service for all customers. According to an article on Digital Spy it was a problem caused by the streaming coming from the Sky Servers which was affecting the whole Sky Player platform.

Unless you've been living under a rock somewhere, you've probably heard of Google Sidewiki already. The latest add-on to Googles' toolbar that enables you to comment on any webpage you visit. Any comments you make are shared with the rest of the world and that's probably where the problem begins, Google's toolbar is probably one of the most popular toolbars in the world. Almost everyone I know has it installed so they can see the Google Page Rank of pages or to use some of the other features it gives such as enhanced in page searching. Naturally everyone who uses the Page Rank is now able to see the Sidewiki as though it was a part of every website you visit. A part of a website that the website owner has no direct control over.creepy?

My first example of this was going onto CNN's website and seeing a comment on Google Sidewiki saying they preferred the BBC. The comment has now been removed, which seemed to happen quite swiftly after I tweeted about it. Google provide a content policy guide on Swidewiki, however I have been unable to find anything on on what to do about inappropriate content posted about your site on Sidewiki if you are the website owner. Take this one step further imagine an online retailer who has comments posted by one disgruntled customer on how they would never use them again. That one entry would probably cost that business heavily in income, even if there was truth to what was being said all online retailers have bad experiences every now and again where they were unable to help the customer or one fell through their customer service web. But saying that Sidewiki could also be a force for good, imagine someone being conned by a fake website setup to sell fake goods? What would be a better way of informing people, than by writing a note on Google Sidewiki?

Those were the harrowing words I read in today's Evening Standard in an article about the French police clearing the "Jungle" camp near Calais. Those words hammered home just how desperate migrants are to get into the UK. This immediately got me thinking why don't they want to stay in France instead of the UK? Or any of the other countries on their way to the UK?

Having watched UK Borderforce a show on Sky 1 that follows immigration offices catching illegal immigrants or stopping them before they come into the UK at Calais. The reasons they give for coming to the UK are quite interesting, some of them are

• Coming to the UK for free education
• Some believe they will get free housing
• Free health care
• To marry someone in the UK and raise a family
• To join family (sometimes distant) already in the UK

But why don't they do these thing in France? Well some of the reasons range from France not being as soft a touch as the UK, the immigrants speak English and therefore naturally want to settle in the UK. Another interesting fact is that the French do have a problem with immigration but these are from ex French colonies where people generally speak French as a second language, they know how the systems work in France and take advantage of it as people who know the system in the UK.

Deporting illegal immigrants is difficult many of them know that as long as they don't carry a passport its practically impossible for them to be deported, however they are not allowed to work. Its a catch situation which the government sought to solve with biometric id cards. The idea is to receive the benefits of "Club Britain" you need a membership card that entitles you to all the club has to offer. Because of wide spread outrage at the id card scheme the government decided to reverse the trend giving immigrants biometric id cards. Even if they did lose the cards their biometric information makes them identifiable to the system once again, hence making them deportable once they had over stayed their welcome.

It seems a vast majority of illegal immigrant based on the above appear to be economic migrants, they are after the ideal life, a better standard of living and a shield against poverty. Reducing this trend can only be done by not making services in the UK as accessible but most importantly helping to improve conditions in countries most illegal immigrants come from. You now start entering a fight against world poverty and we know just how successful that has been in the developing world. What if the old colonial powers started colonising parts of Africa again taking over war torn countries without governments and started making safe haven countries for immigrants, with economic havens, well conditioned and more free from corruption, building these countries up again and then calling elections for them to be handed to a locally formed government. Could it work?

Just seen an article in the Evening Standard where Organic food was considered no healthier than normally grown food by the Foods standards agency. I thought the whole point of organic food was not to have food riddled with potential pesticides and free of being GM. Surely that is healtheir than food that has been grown using pesticides?

Dear blog I am so sorry I have neglected to post anything. I have been rather busy moving home but now that thing are settling down. I promise to post more frequently. Rory

Well we all know it makes sense and a lot of you have said how it would be such a good idea to watch on demand TV on your Xbox 360. If you can see it on your PC why can't you see it easily on your games console which is actually connected to your TV? Well Microsoft and Sky have finally seen sense and quite soon Microsoft will be offering Sky content on the Xbox 360. If you look at how Sky delivers its current offering called Sky Anytime PC, they are using Microsoft's Silverlight technology while everyone else (BBC, Channel 4 and ITV) are using Adobe Flash.  As you can see Sky and Microsoft are quite compatible on the technology front.

While Sky Anytime PC is a good service they do not offer all of their channels live through the service. The majority of the content provided is a catch up service for missed TV episodes (not bad) and for Box Office Movies. It doesn't (and I could be wrong here) look as if Sky will be offering their flagship channel Sky One live through this service, it would be great if they did.  In the ideal world I would like to see everything that is offered via my satellite dish also offered over an IPTV service including on demand content.

It used to be possible to view Sky Player content on your Xbox 360 but only using a Windows XP or Windows Vista machine as a proxy hopefully this should change all of that.