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iPlayer is coming to your Sky+ box, as well as catch-up TV and an undelete option. So no more earbashings after ‘accidentally’ wiping The Only Way is Essex.
Undelete retrieves something you’ve recorded and then deleted. So if you accidentally erase an episode of your favourite show, you can get it back without any fuss. Or if you’ve erased something that you feel was good enough to share with your family, friends, lodgers or passers-by, you can conjure it back from the limbo of deletion and enjoy it again.
Your planner, the section of Sky+ where your recorded shows are listed, now has a Deleted tab. That’s where your discarded shows are stored, as a buffer before they vanish forever. To make sure your hard drive doesn’t get cluttered with deleted shows, the stuff that’s been there longest will automatically disappear as new things fill up the planner — and this time, it’s permanent.
Virgin Media offers a similar function, with a Deleted items folder storing erased episodes. As with Sky+, it allows you to change your mind about things you’ve ditched, or reverse an accidental binning. Deleted shows don’t count towards the percentage total showing how full your hard drive is.
Sky has also renamed Sky Anytime and Anytime+ as On Demand, making it clearer what that part of the service actually does. It’s getting into the catch-up game so you can watch shows you missed in the past week from Sky channels, as well as ITV Player and Demand 5. And BBC catch-up service iPlayer is coming to your Sky+ box “shortly”.
The new features will appear as if by magic, with updates beamed into your box overnight. The first machines to benefit are the latest Sky+HD DRX890 box and the Sky+HD 1TB box. No concrete date for the update has been confirmed, with the new features promised “soon”.
What do you think of Sky’s new features? Which do you prefer: Sky+, Virgin Media, Freeview or another TV service? Tell me your telly thoughts in the comments or on our Facebook page.
