Cancelling Sky...... TV Options **UPDATED**

Russ77

Russ77

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I've been a Sky customer for about 6 years now but the box is getting a bit flakey and quite frankly I don't think I'm watching 90 quid's worth of TV per month!

My first line of approach will be to call them to cancel and cite the failing box & overall cost as a reason for leaving on the off chance they'll offer me reduced subscription and send me a new box (doubt this will happen but if you don't ask you don't get :LOL: )

Looks like it costs around the £200 mark for a Freesat box that works in a similar way to Sky+ which isn't too tragic as it'll pay for itself in a few months.

Whilst we watch the occasional movie on Sky, we generally source from elsewhere. Sports wise I mainly watch cricket but in all honesty, I don't get that much time to just sit & watch it and when I do it's usually via SkyGo on my laptop while Mrs Russ77 watched other stuff. I guess there are places on the WWW where matches can be streamed from ;)

We've also got a multi-room box in the bedroom which is costing £11.75 p/m but that could be replaced with a freesat box too for around £50 (from what I can see).

I would like to stick to means that are as legal as possible but am not totally adverse to solutions that may be a grey area ;)

I've got my PC connected to my TV via HDMI so from what I understand XMBC could be another option for sourcing TV although I have very little knowledge of that.

Whilst I'm happy to use less conventional means to access TV, Mrs Russ77 is less technologically inclined and 15 month old Evie will start kicking off if she doesn't get her fix of Waybuloos :LOL:

I guess the purpose of this post is to get other people's views..... have you left Sky and regretted it or was it the best thing you ever did and what alternatives did you use?
 
Can't you alter your package to reflect what you watch?
I'm sure they'll offer you a deal to stay.
My son called them to say he was moving to Virgin and they offered him a good discount to stay, and gave him a £100 credit on his account.
 
Bobsyeruncle said:
Can't you alter your package to reflect what you watch?
I'm sure they'll offer you a deal to stay.
My son called them to say he was moving to Virgin and they offered him a good discount to stay, and gave him a £100 credit on his account.
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That's a possible solution but if you strip away movies & sport there's a lot of stuff you can get for free anyway with (off the top of my head) the exception of Sky 1, Sky Atlantic and Comedy Central.

Just really wanted to know what the viable options are outside of Sky so I have a bit more bargaining power ;)
 
Android TV box or something along those lines? Assume since it's OK for people to sell them on legitimate websites it's OK to mention them on here?
 
DekHog said:
Android TV box or something along those lines? Assume since it's OK for people to sell them on legitimate websites it's OK to mention them on here?
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think it (the use of the illegal streams, not the actual boxes) would still fall under:
Prohibited content
  • Piracy (of the internet kind)
 
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We cancelled sky a few years ago & bought a Humax freesat box. It did take a while for me to get used to not having sport on all the time, but tbh I don't miss it now.
As you say it paid for itself in about 9 months. :cool: Kerching £'s.......... More money for photography! :D
You can actually click in the menu's & watch the basic sky progs, if there was something missing on freesat (uses the same satellite)
 
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Easy, Netflix, online/demand tv services and Freesat. Im using Netflix and Sky but tbh Ill be ditching Sky in a month as 95% of what I watch is on demand/online. Loads of kids stuff on Netflix..... sign up for a free trial to check out the content.

Probably the cheapest and best looking way to get it on your telly is by using an Amazon fire stick.
 
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OldCarlos said:
We cancelled sky a few years ago & bought a Humax freesat box. It did take a while for me to get used to not having sport on all the time, but tbh I don't miss it now.
As you say it paid for itself in about 9 months. :cool: Kerching £'s.......... More money for photography! :D
You can actually click in the menu's & watch the basic sky progs, if there was something missing on freesat (uses the same satellite)
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We've done the same, and a manhattan box too, and aside from one or two channels I miss that aren't on freesat, I'm more than happy with it.
 
I brought a humax freesat box with you view and twin receivers, can watch and record at the same time. I also have a NowTV movies subscription for £10 a month, that allows 4 devices to be registered and 2 to be watched simultaneously, with different content. Thinking of going Netflix though as they allow 4 devices simultaneously and is slightly cheaper.
 
We have the red eye in our house running Sky to our TV in the 4 bedrooms and dinning room. We paid about £30 for each connection with cable and the distrubution/splitter box fitted by our local shop. It's a one of purchase and has been in for about 10 years and still works fine. You can only watch the one channel on all tv's though, not a problem for me and the wife and we have built in freeview to our other TV's. Not sure this would be okay with your youngster or is it your bedroom??? Cant see the point of paying £11.75pm if its your bedroom you're better off going the red-eye route.

We have dropped our channels to the basic which is £20pm but Sky had an offer on the other week for Sports with 1/3 off for twelve months so we have taken that offer and now I think our total is £37, so not sure how yours is £90 pm?? Our last full package including movies was £52pm.

I have been a Sky customer for over 15 years and I regularly plan to cancel and they will always give you a better deal, the guys on the other end of the phone are putting words into your mouth before they send you to the cancellation dept. This has also worked when there has been a fault on the system, I have had new dishes and boxes and I have never paid for them to come and fix things, I just threaten them with Virgin as I use them for my broadband and the cable is already in the house and they dont charge for repairs.

For your £90, I would be looking to half that for the next twelve months, as that would be the new contract length and you would have to abide with that after the cooling off period.
 
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blimey that's a lot of money !

if you want to stay as people have said its worth the call and you would get a new box for sure.
we left VM TV over a year ago and just went freeview, still keep VM broadband tho
 
Last April I called them and wanted to suspend my account for 6months, I already new that was a non starter. By the time had finished I got a years broadband free and my sky down to £21 / month that was a saving of £20 / month
 
We had virgin installed yesterday. We have had the full sky package for 12 years and our sky box had been acting up for months, we had to re-boot it every 4-5 days. We rang sky up a couple of months ago to see what they could do as we've been with them so long. They offered for an engineer to call and install a reconditioned box but not a new one. At this point we ordered Virgin instead and cancelled Sky. A week before sky was due to be switched off they rang us to try and get us to stay with them. They then came up with this offer...I kid you not.... A brand new box to be installed free of charge and the next 12months top package free of charge. I got more pleasure telling them to stuff the offer than what I would have got accepting it. No doubt I would have had to sign a few years contract.
 
Here's my total Sky Bill:

Sky Go Extra - including discounts FREE
Sky Multiscreen £11.25
Variety with Sports & Movies HD £75.75

Sky Fibre Unlimited £20.00

Sky Talk Line Rental £16.40
Sky Talk Anytime UK £5.00
1571 - Voicemail £1.00
Free items
Total £129.40

I've looked at Plusnet for phone & broadband, they're offering 6 months free on an 18 month contract so it works out to £22.99 pm for the first 6 months then about £36 pm after. Sky BB has been pretty good so I'd be reluctant to change it to save £5 p/m
 
We pay virgin £110 a month, for 160Mb broadband, phone, with all UK phone calls free and to certain mobiles free. All movies, sport and 3 HD tivo boxes in the house.

I can justify it as my wife works from home and was running up £80 a month phone calls so my bill is a lot smaller doing their biggest package.
 
Christ the package with movies is expensive over just a Sports package. The Sports package is £37 currently for me including the original bundle.The Sky sports discount I had was in the weekend papers a couple of weeks ago, so available to anyone. Their current movie bundle is £37 with the original package. Their pricing seems very expensive for bundle upgrades and the more you buy they aern't giving much discount by the looks of things? > http://www.sky.com/shop/sky-bundles/

IIWY I would be on the phone to them PDQ as your there most valuable type of customer and they will come up with something which will be much cheaper than what your paying now. Possibly you can even cut your sports package now as the cricket season must be over by now???
 
I recently got in touch with Sky and told them I was cancelling but purely with a view to getting a better deal from them. Ended up getting a 50% discount for 12 months without having to sign up for another deal.

A mate of mine regularly does this and he was told by one of their telephone consultants that each account can have up to 2 discounts running at any one time. I mentioned this when I was negotiating with them and was advised that it's true to an extent but that it's one discount for TV and one for phone/broadband. As you have both TV and broadband you should be able to get 2 discounts applied to your account. Looking at your figures above I'd be looking to get all of that for about £60 per month
 
it doesnt always work though. a colleague tried the old threaten to leave trick to get a discount and they didn't offer anything.

it was actually cheaper to sign up in his spouses name instead and get new customer offers.
 
Just went through their website as a new customer....... Comes out to £99 p/m for 12 months then reverts to £109 after plus a one off set up fee of £40.

Think I need to get my negotiating hat on, if I could get somewhere near a new box and £60 pm for at least 6 months with no tie in I'd probably go with that and take a little more time to evaluate more long term options.
 
That is a lot of money,i am on talktalk internet phone & tv package works out about £36 a month,which for me is a lot of money,i think for me i could get away with freeview & just the internet & phone,plus i always been an film collector,and i much rather watch a movie anyway,and i have got plenty of them :)
 
simonblue said:
That is a lot of money,i am on talktalk internet phone & tv package works out about £36 a month,which for me is a lot of money,i think for me i could get away with freeview & just the internet & phone,plus i always been an film collector,and i much rather watch a movie anyway,and i have got plenty of them :)
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I agree, it's a lot of money :LOL:

Happy to accept the £40 pm for phone & fibre BB, as I said in a previous post, apart from a few large outages caused by fibre breaks on BT's network I'm consistently getting 36mb download & 9mb upload. Can't find long term deals that are a lot cheaper than that.

Then I guess it's just weighing up cost/convenience/value...... Sky is by far the most convenient (for the wife rather than me) so it would probably make sense to stay put if they can offer me a decent deal.
 
Russ77 said:
I agree, it's a lot of money :LOL:

Happy to accept the £40 pm for phone & fibre BB, as I said in a previous post, apart from a few large outages caused by fibre breaks on BT's network I'm consistently getting 36mb download & 9mb upload. Can't find long term deals that are a lot cheaper than that.

Then I guess it's just weighing up cost/convenience/value...... Sky is by far the most convenient (for the wife rather than me) so it would probably make sense to stay put if they can offer me a decent deal.
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I am probably going to get told of for this :D,but yes ii think its women who watch more tv,tv theses days does seem to me made for them :rolleyes:
 
Russ77 said:
I agree, it's a lot of money :LOL:

Happy to accept the £40 pm for phone & fibre BB, as I said in a previous post, apart from a few large outages caused by fibre breaks on BT's network I'm consistently getting 36mb download & 9mb upload. Can't find long term deals that are a lot cheaper than that.

Then I guess it's just weighing up cost/convenience/value...... Sky is by far the most convenient (for the wife rather than me) so it would probably make sense to stay put if they can offer me a decent deal.
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I have found retention deals depend upon either the person you are speaking to wanting to give a good deal, and the deals being available to them constantly changing, so you may need to call them a couple of times over a period of a month.

You can also sometimes get better deals by insisting on being disconnected, and then a retentions team with better access to deals may call you back in the following days with a good offer.
 
Byker28i said:
We pay virgin £110 a month, for 160Mb broadband, phone, with all UK phone calls free and to certain mobiles free. All movies, sport and 3 HD tivo boxes in the house.

I can justify it as my wife works from home and was running up £80 a month phone calls so my bill is a lot smaller doing their biggest package.
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That's better than what we pay! Our virgin package is £111 per month for 160Mb broadband, phone with evenings and weekends free, top tv package (without movies), all HD channels, 1x 500 Gb Tivo box, I x Hd box (non recordable) and we had to haggle to get that.
 
simonblue said:
I am probably going to get told of for this :D,but yes ii think its women who watch more tv,tv theses days does seem to me made for them :rolleyes:
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Not told off per se, but I can tell you that's definitely not the case in this house.
Far far from it.
 
Rapscallion said:
I have found retention deals depend upon either the person you are speaking to wanting to give a good deal, and the deals being available to them constantly changing, so you may need to call them a couple of times over a period of a month.

You can also sometimes get better deals by insisting on being disconnected, and then a retentions team with better access to deals may call you back in the following days with a good offer.
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That's very true. When I was negotiating they didn't come up with an offer that I was happy with on the first call so I just told them that I wanted to go ahead with the cancellation. Then it's a bit of a Mexican stand-off waiting to see if they'll get back in touch! You'll have a months notice period anyway so it's not like you'll be cut off straight away. I think it was 5 or 6 days later that they called me and offered the 50% discount and no tie in.

I actually quite enjoy haggling with companies.
 
Leslie said:
I recently got in touch with Sky and told them I was cancelling but purely with a view to getting a better deal from them. Ended up getting a 50% discount for 12 months without having to sign up for another deal.
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:plus1: plus a few people I work with have done the same
 
Russ77 said:
I've been a Sky customer for about 6 years now but the box is getting a bit flakey and quite frankly I don't think I'm watching 90 quid's worth of TV per month!
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90 QUID

For the love! who pays that for the telly almost 1100 quid plus license fee of 140 for telly.......:eek: No wonder they can pay billions for football rights and all that........:confused:
 
Russ77 said:
Here's my total Sky Bill:

Sky Go Extra - including discounts FREE
Sky Multiscreen £11.25
Variety with Sports & Movies HD £75.75

Sky Fibre Unlimited £20.00

Sky Talk Line Rental £16.40
Sky Talk Anytime UK £5.00
1571 - Voicemail £1.00
Free items
Total £129.40
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Choke.........splutter........cough

I thought the £36 a month I was paying was enough.

Fibre BB unlimited £26
NowTV £10
You view in freesat £0
 
Russ77 said:
We've also got a multi-room box in the bedroom which is costing £11.75 p/m but that could be replaced with a freesat box too for around £50 (from what I can see).

I would like to stick to means that are as legal as possible but am not totally adverse to solutions that may be a grey area ;)
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Its funny how most of us would draw the line at benefit fraud, shoplifting but happy to essentially steal content! Especially on a photography forum where most value the copyright of the images we take.

Not having a serious pop - i am far from 100% pure and righteous!!! - but my view is that if you want it pay for it, if you don't then don't!

I am about to cancel mine... last time they accepted cancellation and 3 weeks later rang me with a half price deal.
 
I don't think any of us have an issue with paying for it, it's how much Sky/Virgin expect you to pay that's the real problem. Not hard to see why people might go down another route when people are paying £90-£110 p/m for TV.......
 
cambsno said:
Its funny how most of us would draw the line at benefit fraud, shoplifting but happy to essentially steal content! Especially on a photography forum where most value the copyright of the images we take.

Not having a serious pop - i am far from 100% pure and righteous!!! - but my view is that if you want it pay for it, if you don't then don't!
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I guess with large corporate entities that appear to be raking it in there's less of a guilty conscience? Especially when companies like Sky are lining Premiership Wendyballers' pockets with £200K per week :LOL:

Having looked at my Sky package with a view of stripping out what I don't want, it looks like they've done a very good job at grouping programs & features so that you're almost forced into an all or nothing subscription.
 
I called sky to check if I was tied in to any contracts but I wasn't, the guy talked through what might or might not happen if I actually requested to cancel. I was struggling to understand him properly as his accent was quite thick.

Called back on Wednesday night to cancel my TV package. The guy I spoke to said if I kept some form of TV package they would be able to discount it AND apply a discount to my phone & broadband.

So just to recap, I was paying £41 per month for Fibre, phone & calls and £89 for TV inc multiroom so the outcome I expected was to just be paying £41 pm to Sky.

Straight away they offered to drop my who package, as is to £90 pm but I wasn't interested in that.

The deal they came up with was another 12 month contract where I'm on the basic Sky package inc Sky1, HD and Sky+ (so I don't have to buy a freesat box) and my same phone/bb package for £38 pm........ yep, it was cheaper to keep the TV as well :LOL:

I know if I'd have held out them *might* have gone better but I just thought the deal suited me fine so went for it.

A few of my friends/family have been in touch with Sky since and all have been given discount on their packages...... looks like BT/TalkTalk/Virgin etc are hurting them a bit as a few years back they would hardly budge on their prices.

The guy I spoke to actually seemed a decent bloke and urged me to call back next August (when my contract expires) and see what they can offer me then.
 
OldCarlos said:
Just proves ........... it's good to talk! ;)
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It certainly does!

Oh and the other thing I forgot to mention.... I said the box was playing up a bit so they're sending an engineer out FOC on Saturday to take a look and either repair or replace. The guy said that usually the engineers will just replace but don't be fobbed off if the box is still substandard.
 
Give the box a good shake before he turns up, just to be sure. (y)
 
I've had Sky TV, phone and broadband for years and cancelled the TV bit a year ago to switch to Freesat. They tried to persuade me to stay, but my mind was made up. Over the months they sent me various tempting offers to rejoin - typically a 50% TV discount for a year - and finally I was swayed earlier this year with an offer of 60% discount on the TV package plus £100 account credit and a brand new box. It took some haggling to get the new box, but over the course of an online chat session they finally caved. There is no question that Sky TV beats Freesat, not just for the channel lineup, but operation of the box itself. Freesat menus and features are woeful by comparison with Sky, Anyway, I shall keep the Sky package for the required 12 months and then cancel again. Just thought I'd mention it as it was a pretty awesome deal. It can do no harm to make them work for your custom.
 
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