F1 Fanatic

I know quite a few people on here are using Sky GO to watch F1 (both linked to their Sky TV account and the £35 monthly online only ticket).

We are now two races into the season and I thought we could share our experiences.

It’s a great idea and something I feel Sky should embrace a little more than they have so far. It’s been great to watch F1 without requiring a dish to be installed. I rent a flat and have found Sky GO to be my only option.

I’ve used Sky GO in the past at a previous address and with a 50mb internet connection. It rarely streamed well and struggled in both streaming speed and picture quality, especially when compared to other streaming services. I had heard the 50mb Virgin cable lines suffered when streaming content and that caused lots of buffering. I did not have the problem with iPlayer and other such services. So I eventually got frustrated and cancelled my Sky GO monthly ticket.

I’ve since moved and with F1 going live on Sky I decided to give it another shot.

I’m now on a 20mb ADSL line, of which I get a near consistent 15mb speed. The quality of picture and streaming on Sky GO is still lacking. When watching F1 the image jumps around quite a bit and there is obviously a minute or so delay. The audio often gets out of sync.

The thing is their sample channel which is used to entice you into Sky GO has fantastic quality streaming and is near perfect, but once you’ve paid the rest of the channels behind the pay wall drop off in quality and stream poorly.

It’s a shame the user interface is clunky as well. I’d love them to improve the service.

That’s my experience anyway. I have a feeling Sky have set out to limit Sky GO.

I find Sky Go only lasts about 15 minutes before it stops working, I usually have to close the browser, log in again and hope that it’s working. It usually comes up with an error message when it happens, my internet connection is fine as iPlayer works fine usually without buffering at all. Luckily I only watch on Sky Go if someone else is watching the TV.

There are two problems with Sky Go. If you search for the GP Highlights it takes you to a page that immediately tells you who has won the race. Not exactly what you want… And then when you do find the video of the Highlights you find it’s only 10 minutes long…(or – in the case of the Australian Gp 1min 7 secs!)

Sky should quickly edit a highlights programme of at least 1 hr duration (as the BBC does) and they should post the link to that directly on the Sky Go Home page.

I use it on my Xbox 360 and it’s fantastic! Good quality, no dropouts, and only on a 6Mbps connection!

Today, a month after I purchased my first sky go ticket in order to watch Australia and Malaysia GPs, Sky has charged my credit card with £35! To be honest I wanted to wait until the very last minute to buy a ticket to watch Bahrain as I may also be out of the country at the weekend due to my job. And not an email alert on sight about this! I suppose I had to un-check some box or tell them I didn’t want to renew it anymore. Did I misread the T&Cs somewhere? Possible.
Sky for me is more and more a loathed necessity.

I also use it on my Xbox 360 and have found it Good quality with no dropouts, I also only have a 6Mbps connection.