SkybyBroadband is a new service exclusive to BskyB (Sky) digital customers. It allows you to download hundreds of films on your Windows-based computer, including a mix of Hollywood blockbusters and classic movie titles available on Sky Movies.

In addition, you can enjoy highlights from many of the major sporting events on Sky Sports. You'll need to have a PC running Windows XP and a broadband connection of at least 1MB.

However, there are already calls of concern that the strain such a service will place on the ADSL network will make contention a realism for 1000s of users across the country. SkybyBroadband enables current Sky Digital viewers who subscribe to the Movies package and/or the Sports package, the opportunity to download content free of charge.

Sky is quoting that users on a 1Mbit/s service can download a 2-hour movie title in as little as 2 or 3 hours, equating to a filesize of between 120MB and 180MB. By the same ratio, 2Mbit/s customers can download the file in as little as 1 hour and 8Mbit/s connections in under 15 minutes. ADSL2+ users can obviously see the most dramatic download rate - downloading the entire movie in under 5 minutes. Content will be encoded at bit rates of 860Kbit/s and a resolution of 540x432 pixels - hardly DVD or High Definition (HD) quality but we suspect perfectly adequate for the job in hand.

Its believed that 100s of movie titles and sports coverage will be available from launch, all through third-party software by Kontiki, who specialises in securing distributed media preventing it from being duplicated. Once downloaded, the title will be available on the PC only, and the presence of the software from Kontiki implies that export to separate media such as DVD will not be legally possible. Content will typically be licensed for up to 30 days for movies (7 days for sports coverage), and can also benefit from parental controls.

Unlikely to stem the demand on the traditional illegal Peer2Peer/BitTorrent sharing, SkybyBroadband does open an additional channel for end users to make effective use of their high-speed connections at home. With some 4 million of Sky subscribers qualifying for access, it would be fair to say that a high number of those subscribers will also have a broadband service at home and contention could ultimately not only impact those impressive download times we mentioned earlier, but potentially degrade other users ADSL services - even those not using the SkybyBroadband service.

You can sign up now with SkybyBroadband by visiting www.skybybroadband.com.

BIOS, Dec 07, 05 | Print | Send | Comments (0) | Posted In Broadband