Downloading TV – A sting in the tail

Our wonderfully expensive Sky TV box now has an upgraded GUI and the ability to download shows thanks to an ethernet port around the back. It’s no longer just Sky Broadband customers who get the ability to download TV, so we’re happily grabbing shows over our fibre connection (FTTC aka “Infinity”).

I say “happily”, but perhaps I should say a little “too happily”.

TV of late has been pants, with nothing really worth watching in the evenings. We’ve resorted to searching through the “On Demand” section and downloaded a rather old episode of “Prime Suspect” from 1991. This was an age when shows had less ad breaks and the picture was square (4:3) instead of “letterbox” (16:9).

Trouble is, in order to get an entire series you have to download the episodes (obviously) and to see one story you need to download all the episodes.

The first ever Prime Suspect is a whacking 207 minutes – about 3 and a half hours (and that’s without the ad breaks). So, we kinda “got into” this and started downloading all of them.

I got home to find that Emily had downloaded all 7 series … Nearly 25 hours worth of programming. I looked at one of the download sizes – the first series was 1.6GB.

Now, I’m no great mathematician but I this we’ve almosy busted our bandwidth limit for the month, and we’re only half-way through.

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