New Sky Interface

Just got home to find that our HD box has got a completely new GUI ! Picture in picture (that is, picture in menu), no more terrible music. Need to do more investigation later, but SO much better. Hope they've finally got a decent search engine.

We turned off that lousy music ages ago :)

Turns out it's just a trial at the moment - we're just guinea pigs because the wife works at Sky.

EDIT - link to demo on youtube

Boooooooooooooo.

;)

Any idea when it's being pushed out to the masses?

Well, when we turned the telly on and got the menu she said "I thought this wasn't out until Q1 '09". Then about 20 minutes later her Blackberry buzzed to tell us that it was an employee trial.

Did a bit more playing last night - there's a decent search engine now, with whole word search rather than just letter, so that's a big improvement. I never worked out why, when they've got loads of digital radio channels, you couldn't just assign one of them as your menu music if you really wanted it. The new menu just plays whatever channel you've got running in the mini-screen at top right.

Can a mod edit the title of the thread to just 'New Sky Interface' seeing as it's not actually on general release ? Ta !

should be pretty obvious why they're doing this, a pretty good looking Freesat PVR goes on sale next month. Now that Sky have got some competition they're actually trying to earn that subs fee.

Hmmm.

If that's on Sky+ boxes too it'll be good for us but I think my mum will have some problems using it for a while :/

The Sky+ interface has been a long way behind most PVRs for ages, especially the godawful search functions. I remember my wife first telling me about this new one at the beginning of this year, so it's been in the works for ages. Still, like you say, it's the better interfaces on V+ and others which forced their hand in the first place.

More stuff I've noticed - 'series link' is not the only way to grab a whole series now. When you tell it to record something it comes up with a 'whole series' and 'single episode' choice.

Indeed. Freesat HD, 320GB HDD, by Humax. Top price should be £299

Might have a nice interface but nothing to watch.