Any Sky Go users on here please?

Peter Franks said:

I hate to bang on, but really of the 1000 views, does nobody use Sky Go?

Personally I think it's rubbish, but if you know different....

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The problem is that this is an international site where most people won't know what Sky is let alone Sky Go.
Then from the UK members you'll have to hope that someone with Sky Go and an answer takes a look at your thread.

Unfortunately I can't help, I used to have Sky but have never used Sky Go.
If you haven't already it may be worth taking a look at Sky's forum for Sky Go.

If you downloaded the app via iTunes then you have to sync it to your iPhone/iPad. You won't see it in your Mac apps folder.

The quality will likely be to do with your broadband connection or the amount of people trying to watch that feed. The more people trying to access it, the more the quality drops so that the feed can serve more people.

dont use it myself but from what people have said, the quality is/should be excellent. its direct from sky so no excuse for shoddy quality, and i know people who watch all their football on it and who say the quality is good.

wouldnt think there would be an app anyway, for mac or pc, would just be a web page.

i watch celtic games on celtictv over the internet and the picture i get on a 27" imac is as good as watching on tv. i wouldnt expect anything less from skygo.

how fast is your internet connection though? maybe its slower and sky downscale the quality to make it play correctly

Peter Franks said:

It is an app because when you go on the Sky site to view it says 'download the app from iTunes' then takes you to the App store page. After that its nowhere to be seen on the MBP so you go back to iTunes page and it says its already downloaded.

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Apps from iTunes are only for iOS devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod touch) not for OSX.

Peter Franks said:

Thanks people for all your answers. It is an app because when you go on the Sky site to view it says 'download the app from iTunes' then takes you to the App store page. After that its nowhere to be seen on the MBP so you go back to iTunes page and it says its already downloaded.

Because of a visible app on iPhone I expected the same.

Ironically, the broadband is also Sky so that makes sense too. It's rubbish. Mostly. But did expect a clearer page than that. It was unwatchable.


P.S,
Wow, taken ages to get on this site and couldn't at all yesterday. iOS7 not that straightforward then I'm guessing yesterday? Still not available on my ip4 yet. Not showing update.

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You'll want to download the Sky Go Desktop app, it's not available on the Mac App Store afaik.

As for your blurry issues, I have had this when using the Sky Go app on Xbox 360. The quality tends to vary depending on network conditions but I've noticed I get much better quality on my iPhone than the Xbox not sure why or what you can do to fix it unfortunately.

We watch it in browser (expanded to full screen) and then mirror to the Apple TV and the quality is good - occasional skips but I put that down to the convoluted watching method.

As has already been said, apps are only required for iPhone and iPad. Don't know if there is a mac app but it's not required. As for fan activity, haven't noticed major problems on a MacBook Pro. Might be looking at what you have running at the same time. Have found that time machine backups tend to disrupt things.

Just used Sky Go to watch the F1 on my rMBP, the app you can download is for downloaded Sky Go videos only. It downloads an app called "Sky Go Desktop" that you can move from downloads to Applications and run but all it does is shows things you have downloading or have downloaded to watch (requires Sky Go Extra).

To watch live TV on your Mac you have to watch in the browser, there's a small preview window that you can full-screen or open a pop-out player. The quality at full-screen was decent enough for the majority of the 2 hours racing but there were a few dips in quality (similar to your screen caps) for a couple of seconds and a couple of buffering pauses. I'd say quality is on-par with Netflix as both don't offer HD streams on laptops.

I use it and the quality is tip top. It occasionally looks blurry like you've shown, but it clears up as soon as the network settles.

I've watched in on 2mbps broadband previously and it still looks good so I'm guessing something's not right with either your provider or the machine.

I'd suggest uninstalling the Silverlight plugin first. Then revisit the Sky Go page. You should get a prompt to install Silverlight, which will download and you'll need to restart Safari to reinstall. After that it should work fine. I always found clicking the button to watch in a pop-out window made the quality better as it autotunes to what your network can handle.

You might find this forum useful:

http://helpforum.sky.com/t5/Sky-Go-on-Apple-iOS/bd-p/Sky-Go-iOS

SkyGo on MacOSX

Hi all,
I'm an assiduous user of SkyGo (many hours a day, basically everyday). I've experienced very low quality, but probably found a workaround (sort of).

SkyGo is actually done like this :
1) There is an application, it runs in background and runs ALWAYS, it spawns two processes (you can find them in ActivityMonitor) called PCShowServerPMWrapper and NDISPCShowServer (you cannot kill them, they respawn automatically, but usually does not consume a lot of CPU when not in use)
2) From the site, SilverLight is used
3) SilverLight fetches the video stream from the two processes above, instead than directly from the Skygo site
4) The two processes fetch video from the Skygo site, probably they apply some kind of useless content encription to make some over 65 Sky manager feel safe.

I have a very good connection (optical fiber, up to 95MB down on speedtest.net) and I can usually stream in nearly HD quality content from anywhere (using Xbox 360, on various italian TV sites, on YouTube etc..).

However, with SkyGo, I have (had ... read later) this problem : I go to a channel, the player starts, quality is quite good (never excellent, quite good), I click on the "full screen" button, it keeps a good quality for about 10/15 seconds, then it starts buffering and downscaling quality, repeats buffering for a few times (up to 10 minutes), then stabilises at a VERY LOW resolution. Such a bad resolution I could not recognise faces in movies.

If I DON'T click the fullscreen button, however, it keeps working at a decent resolution.

At first I thought it was a video card problem (I'm on last generation mac mini, hdmi to a hdmi hub, wireless HD to an Epson beamer), probably too many pixels to handle when in full screen, some sync stuff or something similar.

So, I tried ZOOMING IN with the browser, and placing the browser (Chrome, latest version) in presentation mode (it's in the View menu).

With browser heavily zoomed, the video box takes the full screen (so, same quantity of pixels moving), and IT DOES NOT degrade, it keeps the acceptable quality.

So, the problem seems to be :
1) Maybe, when you go into fullscreen, it changes the underlying stream (the idea is to fetch a better quality stream for fullscreen, I suppose)
2) Maybe, it takes the wrong stream, and goes low quality instead of high quality
3) Maybe, the bandwidth allocation for high resolution streams on the server is so slow that they actually perform worse than "normal" resolution streams
4) Maybe, the stream is okay, but either Silverlight or the two background processes does not manage to handle it, it goes in buffer underrun and scales down

It seems like in an older version of Skygo there was a "quality" setting, which permitted to manually choose video quality (so probably, switch between different streams), but now they decided the Silverlight thingy was able to handle it automatically .. thing which is obviously wrong.

I haven't used all possible tools (netstat, tcpdump, whatever else) to track down the bug completely (I'm paying them, not the opposite way around, so no time to waste).

Can anyone else using Skygo on a similar setting (OSX basically) run some tests and confirm? In case, we could mass-write mails asking to investigate the problem.

Hope this helps work around the problem, I still think they simply booched the automatic bandwidth scaling system in the player.

Simone