So I cancelled my sky and actually listened to stw!

Been toying with the idea for a while. Asked on here for other options. Amongst the suggestions was to stand firm with sky and to expect phone calls trying to win me back etc. Sky is finished tomorrow. I received a letter yesterday advising me that as I’m such a loyal customer I can keep all the sky features, pause rewind, on demand etc.
However they’ve now chucked in broadband and it’s all for free. All I need to do is keep my line rental with them, I was doing that anyway as it’s slightly cheaper than BT.
Thanks stw, and I suggest you all cancel your sky and await the calls.

🙂

What about tv?

Yes TV as well but no family pack or whatever shit I was paying for before. All in now for 17 quid a month.

What TV are you left with? Specifically, which HD channels?

@IHN, in case you are not aware there are tons of HD channels on FreeSat. My understanding is Sky provide the FreeSat channels for free too

Yeah, it’s the Sky-specific channels I’m interested in though (Atlantic, Living etc), they don’t seem to be on Freesat

It’s sad that their customer retention policy is to do nothing till you’ve cancelled then the day after they switch off your service offer you the world. I blindly paid the bills for 4 years and now have free sky tv for 8 moths than half price for the following year

Just cancelled my sky…seemed terribly easy

Just got one of the kodi android boxes instead which I’m struggling to set up so it all works in a child friendly sort of way

I’ve cancelled my Sky satellite as well.

I’m currently looking at getting Plusnet Youviewfor Eurosport, as well as using Sky Freesat. However, I’m struggling to find how to get the Good Food channel (yes, I know, sad huh?)

When I cancelled (2 years ago) I got nothing from them. Just radio silence.

I cut my monthly payment substantially about 8 months ago by calling up to cancel. Got all sorts of half price deals applied. Phoned again when the deals ended and the guy couldn’t have been more helpful – gave me the date I need to call in 6 months to get the same deals again – I’m fine with that.

I pay £70 for the full sky hd package, multiroom, line rental and fibre optic broadband.

What alternatives to Sky Movies and Kids Channels (Nick Jnr, etc) are people using?

This routine works fine on Virgin Media too.

I do it routinely every year or 2.

This time,a few months back, I really did think I was going to get cut off, really wouldn’t offer a better deal. Got an end date, the lot.

However, sure enough, 2 weeks later the call arrived, totally different attitude and got the discount I was after. The call always comes from their retention team.

All the big BB/ TV providers work fairly similarly to my knowledge.

That might exclude Talk Talk as they are a complete joke of a company.

There’s threads on this all over the web, hundreds of millions of pounds must be getting paid extra by people just because they don’t call and haggle.

I’ll be doing this in the new year. Don’t want to faff now as there will be a few movies I want to watch at Christmas!

Any changes you make to your package now won’t take affect for 30 days anyway. So if you’re just looking to get rid of movies you’ll still have it at Christmas.

Good point.

The other thing is I currently have three boxes so I’d want to ensure that they’d still work – what would happen to them if I cancelled my Sky sub – I don’t get broadband or phone through Sky because they only offer broadband with a usage cap where I live (God knows why – other providers don’t).

I’m thinking of leaving Virgin as I don’t really use the TV any more or the phone I just need decent unlimited broadband. Any recommendations?

I find Plusnet to be good.

There are alot more HD channels on Sky – things like BBC3HD, BBC4HD. It’s the only thing preventing me from cancelling – I’ve paired down my Sky subscription to the absolute minimum but I would miss the sheer number of HD channels available to me – they’re quite limited on normal Freesat. I can get the pause/rewind features off my telly with a USB HDD (it has twin freesat tuners so can record while watching another channel too). Not sure how Sky have managed to wangle tieing up most of the HD channels exclusively.

I did this a couple of weeks ago. Kept putting it off because I didn’t want to have a lengthy argument with a call centre. I wish now that I’d done it years ago.

Had some family bundle or other, unlimited ADSL broadband and line rental with BT. So that’s £18/month of free money to BT and around fifty quid to Sky. Rang to cancel, with no fuss I got straight through to an absolutely lovely woman in Retentions who couldn’t have been more helpful.

She asked why I was cancelling, I told her (honestly) that it was too dear and that the box kept crashing and I couldn’t afford to replace it.

Long story short, I’ve now novated the line rental to them, got an upgrade to Unlimited Fibre broadband, got shut of all the TV channels I never watch, got a brand new box and a new dish, and a new monthly fee of under £35 all in. Oh, and she’s told me to ring back when the offers expire (ten months for the line rental and twelve for everything else) so they can renegotiate a new deal for me. Happy days.

There are alot more HD channels on Sky – things like BBC3HD, BBC4HD.

Does that really matter to people? I just have freeview but never remember to watch the HD version of whatever channel im on, and i have a fancy 50″ plasma TV. But then im the sort of person who thinks its just entertainment to pass time but obviously to some people its more than that.

Yes, to me at least. The picture quality is significantly better via HD channels. I’m sick of new technology actually taking us a step backwards – I used to get better sound quality from my Cassettes than some MP3 files, and I want to maximise the HD content I watch. That’s just me though.

I’m thinking of leaving Virgin as I don’t really use the TV any more or the phone I just need decent unlimited broadband. Any recommendations?

My loyalty bonus ended last month so bill is going to go up £10pm, shopped around and it’s really hard to match Virgin in terms of bang for your broadband buck.Phoned up and got loyalty bonus of £9pm. Probably enough to keep me from moving.

All the big BB/ TV providers work fairly similarly to my knowledge.

It costs so much to acquire a new customer, that keeping customers is essential. During an 18 month contract it might only be month 13 when the customer breaks even for the provider.

Which is why the threat to leave puts you into a loyalty team with a greater array of discounts and offers than the from line contact centre agents.

It’s much easier if the business just runs good offers for existing customers. They’ll never give them without asking, but they do get much better customer loyalty and satisfaction doing that.

It’s a balancing act between not waking up customers who would otherwise just continue blindly paying, and investing in acquiring new customers.

It’s a cut throat business.

I think the best offer they made me when I cancelled came througha couple of months later, new box, half price package and £100 cash back. I still declined though.

There are alot more HD channels on Sky – things like BBC3HD, BBC4HD.

They seem to be on freesat too now.
BBC 3 HD & BBC 4 HD

I was most surprised to see the deal BT offered me to stay when I decided to end my infinity 2, I didn’t expect them to play the same game as sky etc.

I thought from reading your thread title that by cancelling your Sky subs, you could afford the lead flashing to finish off your slate tile hung garden wall…

I is disappoint.

PlusNet btw.

Anyone done this and kept the Sky Sports channels? All I really get from Sky is the Sports Package and Sky Atlantic. Everything else is rubbish. Can’t lose the sport though.

Right that’s it Phonecall on Monday been meaning to do for ages. BT knocked £8 off per month for broadband when I rang to renew and that was without asking.

There are alot more HD channels on Sky – things like BBC3HD, BBC4HD

they’ve been on freeview for a while.

STATO – Member

Does that really matter to people? I just have freeview but never remember to watch the HD version of whatever channel im on, and i have a fancy 50″ plasma TV. But then im the sort of person who thinks its just entertainment to pass time but obviously to some people its more than that.

Well yes it does to Sky customers who watch all of their TV via the Sky box, that’s because they actively dumb down the SD channels so idiots people pay to watch the HD content that is freely available on, er, freeview, more of a contention to those that pay for sports in SD though.

. But then im the sort of person who thinks its just entertainment to pass time but obviously to some people its more than that.

Yup some people buy a big fancy 50″ plasma to watch TV on.

But then im the sort of person

who needs to get down to SpecSavers…

Actually, having a plasma may be saving you a lot of issues with PQ, as plasmas ‘smooth’ things out courtesy of the nature of the screen technology.

Remember how people always used ot say plasmas gave better pictures, and that was in the days when most of them were 480P.

It is very poor that we are stuck with so many SD channels, especially when the quality of these SD channels is not as good as the old PAL broadcast SD.

Need to ring Sky up and get mine reduced, gone up by £20 a month as one of my deal’s has ended! Would get freeview but got rubbish signal here!!

I thought there was some kind of stw podcast 😳

Toffer – get a freesat box then? Just unhook the sky lead and whack it into your new box? Unless they discount your deal again to your satisfaction of course.

Currently on the phone to them now.

Currently £75 a month. Cunning gits though.

TV package is now out of contract but broadband isn’t 🙁

They have offered a 6 month deal bringing it down to £45, and then back up to £68 after 8 months…but then at that point under contract for TV but not Broadband…so they have you by the danglees.

Just waiting to cancel the TV element.

Biggest downfall I can see so far is that we will loose all the TV we have currently recorded…