Hi All,
I am thinking of cancelling my Sky TV contract.
I'm just trying to reduce our household bills as things are a little tight nowadays...
I currently have a TV package with them that is everything but without Movies and Sports. Also have broadband with them that includes weekend calls
and maybe some calls in the evening and relatively recently have moved the phone line from BT to them aswell. So I've got a few things with them
at the moment.
My request for advice is this:
If I cancel Sky, do I have to change my phone number?
What deals are there out there for phone lines? (I VERY RARELY use the home phone!)
What deals out there for Broadband?
What are my options for TV (BT Vision has been suggested, so that's an option, but seems to have setup costs)
I would prefer to keep as much with one company if possible, not essential, but I'm lazy when it comes to sorting bills and getting better deals
etc...
Cheers and thanks in advance!
Steve
Tbh I think you have one of the cheapest/best all in one packages going.
I saved a lot of money changing from individual services to sky all in one.
Maybe downgrade the tv and tell them your thinking of cancelling, see if they'll do you a deal
you probably have a good deal now. i would stick rather than twist mate! i do like my sky but my tv package alone is £52
I am pretty sure that I'm currently on a 6 month half price TV deal from the last time I called "to cancel"...
Hmmm Darn it...
You can keep your phone number when you switch to another provider it's called number porting.
Pants you could always do Freesat (not Freesat from Sky). That small box in our conservatory is Freesat. It was about 50 on Ebay and it's HD and
has plenty of channels to watch, all for free. You could always cancel and then.....u2...
BT Broadband and phone is about £15 ish? these days for new customers and free for three months too...what "is ya" paying now?
http://www.broadband-finder.co.uk/providers/bt-broadband/?li=3&et=bt-bb&gclid=CO283frzl6gCFcod4QodUyL6Cw#merchant
Don't think the above includes line rental?
Ours is about £40 with virgin, which includes (mostly) 10 meg broadband, most of the channels (not the films and sports, although we do get a few of
each) and a phone line mostly used for 0800 calls
if you do decide to move your phone service elsewhere, DON'T speak to sky to cancel it. if they set up a cancellation, then you will lose the number. you will keep the number if your new supplier contacts sky to take the line over, ie, you don't actually cancel the line.
I was spending £60-£75 a month on BB/TV/Phone with virgin. It was their top package and was great...
But we felt the pinch and so I cancelled it.
I'm now on talk talk for BB and phone - its about £6.99 a month (plus the £12 line rental).
And I bought a freeview box.
Its not as good, net is a touch slower, free ADSL router is crap and freeview is average at best - but I now save £40-55 A MONTH.
Also got my mobile contract down from £35 PM to £15. I wasnt using the minutes, I still dont. I was in contract too, but I just said I'd leave if
they didn't drop me to a cheaper deal.
So thats another £20 a month.
So between £60 and 75 saved, leaving me with £700-800 extra in the families pocket, for not a lot of difference.
Seriously, phone then up and say you want it cheaper, I did and negotiated it down from £60 per month to £18 per month, they really don't like losing customers. I stipulated the channels I wanted to keep and got rid of the rest. For instance you can keep some sports channels without taking the sports package (I kept Motors TV but dropped the other sports channels). To be fair to them they really will negotiate and try to keep you.
quote:
Originally posted by norfolkluego
Seriously, phone then up and say you want it cheaper, I did and negotiated it down from £60 per month to £18 per month, they really don't like losing customers. I stipulated the channels I wanted to keep and got rid of the rest. For instance you can keep some sports channels without taking the sports package (I kept Motors TV but dropped the other sports channels). To be fair to them they really will negotiate and try to keep you.
Don't forget to check Money Saving Expert:
http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/
We've saved loads with his hints.
Cheers,
James
I swopped about this time last year, they were really helpful, really keen to keep me as a customer, I'd called them to cancel, I was
flabbergasted at how much they were willing to drop the price to keep me, if they hadn't I would have cancelled but I wasn't expecting them
to move so much, may just depend on who answers the phone.
Edit. I made the phone call because someone told me they had just negotiated a similar deal, didn't think it would work but it did, my tip would
be start the conversation by saying you want to cancel, worked for me, what have you got to lose.
[Edited on 12/4/11 by norfolkluego]
I'd have a freeview box, but half of what I watch are on the discovery channels that don't come with freeview... Then again we could just get rid of it all and connect a cheap pc to the tv and use that instead...
i ditched both the home phone and the broadband, now use mobile broadband that boils down to about £3 a month. Sadly the wife is addicted to telly so
couldnt do anything with the sky
Couple months ago we got sky hd for Free! Update from sky+. With multiroom at half price(£5) so we pay about £55 with phone, bb unlimited, and sky hd
without sports and films. Free installation etc etc
My wife rang up to question something and the chap on the phone said "oh btw we have an offer on atm"
So there's still offers on.
Agree with the comments on negotiating with Sky
currently paying £30 a month for everything but the movies including HD
I got rid of Sky a few years ago now, when Freesat HD started up - never regretted it, the only thing I miss the Discovery Channels - great not to be
paying out every month.
Spent less than what I saved on a Virgin cable contract for 30Mg downloads (so I can download fast anything I'm missing not having Sky) and the
basic phone line too with them, like you the house phone is for incoming only really.
I believe I have a perfect solution to the whole thing. Im currently testing it all but if you have a bit of tech knowledge anyone could get this
working.
you need a pc as a server, doesnt need to be amazing, but needs to run windows and have a decent (or 2) network cards, its also going to need to be
hard wired into your network (clients can be wireless if you wish)
1. stick a DVB-T (freeview)or DVB-S2 (freesat) tuner card in it (or combinations of into your server)
2. install Mediaportal TV Server - this will distribute the video from the capture cards around the home, the more cards you add the more Live
channels you can watch/record at once
3. install Mysql and xbmc, configure xbmc to use mysql instead of the default local db and setup all your movie and tv folders
4. install sabnzb - this will trawl websites looking for download locations of TV shows and Movies
5. install SickBeard - this will let you add TV shows you like and it will tell sabnzb to download them (as its just a web page it can be accessed
from any device, so adding tv shows can be done by anyone)
6. install couchpotato - same as sick beard except its for movies.
all you need now are as many clients as you like that will run xbmc (the new apple TV 2 at £99 will but xbmc is still an early release for it). they
can watch live tv using DVB-T (freeview) or DVB-S2 (freesat), they can record to a single location on your network, so one recording is available to
all clients in the home. movies and tv to download is easily added by any family member and can even be setup to work externally, so you could be
adding tv shows from work
my own build at home consists of a old dual core athlon 64 with 4gb ram and 6tb of hard disk space, 2 dbs-2 and a dvb-t card for tv. downsides at the
moment is the PVR build of xbmc is in early development and things just break randomly, requiring regular updates. the pvr release of xbmc is
currently on the roadmap for september of this year, so by then this should be fully functional.
XBMC rocks, even without the PVR functionality. Get yourself an account on thebox or bitmetv and you'll never need Sky again.
I bought an Acer mini PC with HDMI out from Maplin when it was on special offer a year or so ago. Installed XBMC live using a USB CDROM drive. Once
it's up an running I'd recommend putting the Aeon skin on top too as it rocks.
Chris
Chris, what's the difference between XMBC and XMBC Live?
XBMC Live just allows it to boot and be fully functional from a CD/DVD/USB Stick
even cleverer though, is booting from a network. then you have no disks at all in the clients and every setup on the clients is identical
If I could find a way to incorporate some of the p2p live tv streaming, you can then pretty much watch anything around the world for free
my next thoughts was a moveable satellite for picking up the foreign tv streams of the sport
Sorry for being dim, but why would I want to boot from cd instead of just running it in windows? I current have an asrock media pc connected up to the
network and my big telly, used for p2p and surfing and watching movies through windows media centre. So what's the advantage of running xmbc? I
used a humax hd pvr for all my telly functions.
The only thing I thnk i miss out on is Discovery channels, and waching iplayer in hd as the asrock can't handle it ( it uses gpu acceleration in
vlc and wmc which the iplayer doesn't seem to support) and iplayer doesn't seem to support it.
I know this is a wierd suggestion but you could get rid of the TV, I did 12 years ago. It saves you a load of money and makes you do interesting
things like talk to the people in your house. I confess that I do watch some programs on i-player and the like and we have been known to use the
laptop to watch the odd DVD.
It is easily the best thing I ever did.
And I'm really quite normal, well at least I think I am.
Steve
quote:
Originally posted by MikeFellows
I believe I have a perfect solution to the whole thing. Im currently testing it all but if you have a bit of tech knowledge anyone could get this working.
you need a pc as a server, doesnt need to be amazing, but needs to run windows and have a decent (or 2) network cards, its also going to need to be hard wired into your network (clients can be wireless if you wish)
1. stick a DVB-T (freeview)or DVB-S2 (freesat) tuner card in it (or combinations of into your server)
2. install Mediaportal TV Server - this will distribute the video from the capture cards around the home, the more cards you add the more Live channels you can watch/record at once
3. install Mysql and xbmc, configure xbmc to use mysql instead of the default local db and setup all your movie and tv folders
4. install sabnzb - this will trawl websites looking for download locations of TV shows and Movies
5. install SickBeard - this will let you add TV shows you like and it will tell sabnzb to download them (as its just a web page it can be accessed from any device, so adding tv shows can be done by anyone)
6. install couchpotato - same as sick beard except its for movies.
all you need now are as many clients as you like that will run xbmc (the new apple TV 2 at £99 will but xbmc is still an early release for it). they can watch live tv using DVB-T (freeview) or DVB-S2 (freesat), they can record to a single location on your network, so one recording is available to all clients in the home. movies and tv to download is easily added by any family member and can even be setup to work externally, so you could be adding tv shows from work
my own build at home consists of a old dual core athlon 64 with 4gb ram and 6tb of hard disk space, 2 dbs-2 and a dvb-t card for tv. downsides at the moment is the PVR build of xbmc is in early development and things just break randomly, requiring regular updates. the pvr release of xbmc is currently on the roadmap for september of this year, so by then this should be fully functional.