managed to get it working finally.

my review based on early impresssions follows:


Library:
'watch now' library for TV is very weak. only 10 shows, all British and all older than 2007 (some form the 1980s)
movies watch now library is not bad. quite a few from 2011. about 360 movies in the total library

pay per view library seems odd. they said new releases would be pay per view, but have found a lot that are from 2006 or before (e.g. Van Helsing)

Interface:
pretty good. you can search for movies by genre, title, year of release, etc. each movie has a short synopsis so you cna work out if you think it is worth watching or not. Link to IMDB would be nice.

quality:
haven't yet tried streaming on my Sony TV or PS3. hopefully it will work.
stremaing on my laptop works fine, although takes quite a while to connect ot the stream. running it over a 20mbps connection only had to buffer once.
However, picture quality is very poor. I wouldn't even class it as SD. quite a bit of ghosting on fast moving shots
audio hard to tell. seems fine. haven;t run it over home theatre so difficult to judge


Summary:

as a standalone alternative to Sky, not good. wouldn't reccomend dropping sky for this.

as an alternative to subscribing to Sky Movies or Multiroom, I think it works. It's cheaper than either of those and has a good enough movie library to carry it through the first couple of months privided they upgrade it as often as they claim.
I won't be unmetered with my ISP, but doesn't bother me. I am on an 80GB plan anyway, most of which goes on torrenting (which will largely dissapear if I use this service). In fact i may be able to reduce my plan because I tend to torrent a lot of stuff I never watch just in case. with this, I will only be downloading something I actually watch.