Why Sky and TVNZ's Igloo will melt

I love Igloo's content line-up (read NBR's round up of the new pay TV service, a Sky TV-TVNZ joint venture, here).

It seems tailored to a Sky TV hold-out like me.

You get all the free-to-air channels, a tasty line-up of middle-brow channels drawn from Sky proper, on-demand movies, and a pay-per-view sports channel – perfect for a fairweather fan like me.

And you can’t argue with $25 per month.

But I won’t be subscribing.

I have two objections to Igloo.

First, it looks like the new set-top box will launch without full listings for Mediaworks’ TV3 and Four in its electronic programming guide. That’s annoying, but it’s easy to imagine Mediaworks will eventually come inside the Igloo. (The government favours Igloo; Mediaworks owes the government $43 million. Connect the dots.)

Second, Igloo has no hard drive, so you can’t record anything (a USB stick can be plugged in for live pause, but does not support recording). I'm just gob-smacked at this omission (as were others when I raised it on Twitter). Especially at a time when a 500GB hard drive can be bought for under $100 and digital TV tuners less -  presumably a lot less if you have bulk-buying power).

Click to enlarge.

So as much as I’d like Comedy Central and UKTV and BBC Knowledge et al, I’m not about to abandon my Freeview HD player.

My household records tons of shows – most of them on series link – and I just can’t imagine losing that convenience. (For on-demand movies, I use Apple TV – having given up on TiVo’s Caspa. The Apple TV box plugged into our regular telly allows you to rent movies, or store them permanently. Igloo will only live-stream on-demand content).

Now, Sky’s probably not too fussed that I object to Igloo’s lack of recording functionality.

If I wailed about the lack of hard drive, the company could always try to upsell me to a MySky decoder.

I don’t like that. But I get it. Funnelling people from the trainer-wheels set-top box (Igloo) to Sky proper could become a nice little earner.

At the very least, it means Igloo will pick up budget pay TV viewers without cannibalising MySky (Sky's official line is that its consumer research showed price was the most important element. I'm dubious. Just under half the population is not on Sky TV - surely some of that 49% could stretch to an "Igloo+" option that added a hard drive and cost, say, $300 - $400).

But why would TVNZ (with TiVo fading into its $17.7 million sunset) support a box with no recording ability?

Beats me.

If I were TVNZ chief executive Rick Ellis, I'd be house hunting in Sydney demanding Igloo 2.0, featuring a hard drive, quick-smart. That would have me pulling out my credit card (well, probably - having the paid channels in HD rather than standard definition digital, and un-metered data, would also help).

Freeview responds

I asked Freeview general manager Sam Irvine for his thoughts on yesterday's launch. 

If I were Sam, I'd be a pretty happy man right now; Igloo could have made a much stronger play for the 49% of the population who are not on Sky, and the 21% who are not on Sky, Freeview or any other digital platform. 

The Freeview boss kept things reasonably diplomatic, saying "The lack of a hard drive with this new Sky offering means a MyFreeview HD digital television recorder is still the best option for viewers to record and watch their favourite shows when they want to without a monthly subscription."

He added, "Currently over a million New Zealanders use Freeview for their free to air digital television viewing so we are of course disappointed that this is not a Freeview-compatible product like TiVo, Sony Play TV and the TelstraClear T-Box."

Mr Irvine noted that the cheapest Freeview decoders sell for $80, and that Freeview HD is built into most new TVs.