Let's face it, Sky Sports is pretty expensive. A subscription to just Sky Sports 1 is £26.50 per month, rising to £35.50 if you take the full sports package. Add ESPN and it's another £9.
With Sky Mobile TV News and Sport for iPhone, Sky has made all of Sky's Sports channels (Sky Sports 1, 2, 3, Xtra and News) plus ESPN, At the Races and Sky News, available to watch on Apple's device. And you don't even have to be a Sky Sports subscriber at home – all you pay is £6 per month subscription.
But you can only watch when you have a Wi-Fi network in range. The latter is almost certainly a restriction placed by O2 – something we saw with Sling Media's iPhone app. Compared to a regular Sky Sports subscription, the app is cheaper.
Obviously you don't have the channel choice – this is just news and sport, and unless you have an Apple Component AV cable, you're limited to the small screen. But you do get all the live Premiership and Football League games from Sky and ESPN, live international and domestic cricket, La Liga, Serie A, live US Open tennis and much, much more.
There's no on-demand like Sky Player – this is just live – but for £6 per month, it's undeniably very good value. The electronic programme guide is well put together – you can see what's on now and next, and by hitting the arrow next to the listing, you can browse what's on in the next 12 hours.
When you're watching, quality is incredible – much better than we expected. We tested the app on a Virgin 50Mb and a BT 8Mb connection, as well as using The Cloud at Paddington station.
On no occasion did we ever experience any buffering. Quite remarkable, really. You can even pause – as with Sky+ – and rewind the action back 30 seconds.
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Your comments (3) Click to add a new comment
jwball
February 16th 2010
3. I think you'll find that the component output is disabled by the app. No plugging the iphone into the plasma I'm afraid.
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tombentworth
February 11th 2010
2. Any chance this sky sports deal will be made available to other handsets like android based phones?
It would be great to be given a choice of av outputs (vga, dvi) instead of just the component output currently available on the iphone.
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chrisjones6
January 18th 2010
1. You were lucky with buffering... I find that on the more popular programmes (eg. premiership football, cricket) the feed will buffer or cut out altogether every few minutes. Usually you can get back in quite quickly; but sometimes you can't reconnect. (This is with a 20 meg wireless connection.) When it works, though, the quality is good. Like Sky Player on the PC, the feed is typically a couple of minutes delayed rather than truly live.
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