halper86:

 

VTV was no strings attached, this 'Sky Pod' has strings attached. I loved how you could pay a month to month sub for Sky instead of being locked into a contract for a year. When lockdown rolled around, FTA had nothing interesting, streaming apps got boring after a while and got sick of ads on YT. The joys of VTV was you could skip the ads and record to the cloud for FREE, now Sky wants to charge $15/m for the privilege.

 

Sorry Sky, but its a no from me. I won't be the only one!

 

Regarding Vodafone TV, my take on the situation:

Majority of customer's are using it for Free to Air. Large numbers of Kiwibuild style New build housing has been built without TV antenna's / satellite dishes. And the sales people are quite versed with telling people to just get Vodafone TV as it is cheaper than an aerial install.

Objectively it is a sweet service. Relatively cheap unit, and all the hard work being done in the cloud by vodafone for free :). Issue is it costs Vodafone money to run that cloud service, and they don't make any money back from it. Easy to see how they are keen to shut the service down.

That said Vodafone & Sky do make money off the minority of VTV customers who pay for the sky upgrade. Hence VTV has been kept alive until an alternative service can be stood up to retain these people. This is sky pod.

Sky doesn't seem to have any interest in taking on the Free to Air VTV users. This does seem to be a bit of a missed opportunity. Perhaps they could have done a Sky Pod Basic offering for say $5 a month, which would cover the cost of the cloud side of providing free to air, while keeping these users as sky customers, so they can market up sells to them.

But as it stands at the moment. VTV free to air users will need to pony up for a setup to get their TV some other way when the service ends.