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...I keep going for the pause and rewind button! 🙂
It's rather useful when you want a quick toilet break!
What's the cheapest way to get this feature back? Freeview or Freesat box? Don't really need any recording facility.
New house has a dish but set up for Sky Q, so not sure if those connections will work with a Freesat box.
Freesat works with the LNB's of Sky I believe. I dont know from experience as Sky came back to me a week before I was due to terminate with a good deal so I stayed! I was looking to replace my Sky Boxes with either the new apple TV or Google Chromecast TV, think I would have ended up like you and missing being able to pause and rewind stuff!
My 8 year old Samsung can use a USB stick for pausing purposes - any chance yours can do the same? OTOH about 99% of our household viewing these days is through an app anyway, so its not really an issue
You might need to change the LNB on your dish if you had sky Q
I had to replace mine recently to get Freeview working on a sky dish.
Well at least you now have loads of time on your hands instead of spending hours on hold trying to get through to Sky's non-existent customer service department.
For me it was to take a Virgin Fibre deal, the package included a Tivo PVR for free, only free to air channels though. Worth considering if you are on their network and you are out of broadband contract
You might need to change the LNB on your dish if you had sky Q
I had to replace mine recently to get Freeview working on a sky dish.
The new 4k Freesat boxes can use the wideband LNB that Sky Q uses, allows for 4 channels to be recorded/watched.
£230 for a 500GB box, that's your cheapest/best option.
https://www.freesat.co.uk/get-freesat/set-top-boxes/recordable-4k-tv-box
You stop missing it after awhile even more so as everything is pretty much available to stream now anyway.
I use an AppleTV box and iPlayer/All4 etc. “Watch from start” has become essential, couldn’t do without it.
I got a new LNB to swap from the Sky Q item (I tried the Q LNB, but it didn't work). Less than a tenner on ebay, and a few minutes to swap over depending on access.
Now using Freesat, with a 1TB hard drive plugged into the (LG) TV for pausing/recording stuff, though it'll only record what you are watching. I can, however, watch stuff on the apps - iPlayer, More4 and Firestick etc, while it's recording off Freesat.
No regrets
Just record the program and watch that. I take it you are still going to use the box for Freeview stuff.
We got a Manhattan Freeview Play box that allows us to record and pause live TV and access on demand services and YouTube on the TV. Been fine for us so far.
We have a cheap Roku box which connects via wi-fi and gives us BBC iPlayer and other things and is pretty good.
Stream everything, it's all on demand (assuming you've got a reasonable download speed of course)
All streaming in our house. Could you not just time you’re loo breaks better!?
We moved jan last year and I still haven't got round to sorting the dish for our Freesat from sky Q setup. Been streaming using an apple TV and it's great. Every normal channel available and you can pause live TV. Should be the same on most streaming devices.
Does the 'Freesat from Sky' card work in the Q box? I'd just try that and use apps/streaming for pause/rewind duties.
Humax aura Freeview play box is the answer.
Freeview TV with live tv pause ,rewind etc, series link record, record 2 other channels whilst watching a 3rd, all the catch up services, plus the usual streaming services in 4k (Netflix,Disney ,prime etc). It's an android TV device,so all the usual apps can be installed. Watch recorded programs on your phone using the aura app, remotely schedule recordings from the phone,watch live tv from your phone etc etc
No ongoing subscriptions, apart from for any streaming services you choose to subscribe to.
As per ta11pau1’s recommendation I recently pulled the plug on Sky and bought a new 1TB 4K Freesat box from Richer Sounds https://www.richersounds.com/freesat-uhd-4x-1tb.html …this was a straight swap for the SkyQ box and is compatible with the wideband LNBs required for SkyQ allowing 4 simultaneous recordings. The experience has been good so far… pausing and rewinding live TV and the EPG is almost as snappy as SkyQ but not quite as polished. The Freesat companion app is a little flakey and crashes when recordings are set… hopefully this will be fixed and it will become genuinely useful.
Not had broadcast TV for a couple of years in our house.
Most of the time we use a 4K Firestick. Except for BBC iPlayer which sucks on the firestick. We use either an Apple TV box or the TV’s built-in iPlayer app.
We just use the apps. They all seem to have play/pause.
It did take me a while to figure out how to bring up a live news program for visiting relatives a few weeks back though.
You (and others) mention Freeview. Do you get a TV picture through your aerial? That's what Freeview is.
If you just want to pause live TV, depending on the television it might be as simple as adding USB storage. Does your TV remote have play / pause buttons? Do you get any on-screen messages if you press them?
Thanks all - just to clarify...
• We've just moved into a new house that had been using Sky Q, so the dish is a Sky Q one.
• Our old Sky was the olde-worlde Sky HD box. This is now on the recycling pile!
...I think one of the 4k Freesat boxes will be the way to go as the signal through the aerial for Freeview is a bit ropey (so a new aerial would be needed).
The wife hates scrolling through the streaming menus (don't ask!) so some sort of recording and series link would be useful anyway.
If you just want to pause live TV, depending on the television it might be as simple as adding USB storage. Does your TV remote have play / pause buttons? Do you get any on-screen messages if you press them?
I've tried that - even though my TV is a newish 4k Samsung it doesn't seem to have that option.
Ta!
The wife hates scrolling through the streaming menus (don’t ask!) so some sort of recording and series link would be useful anyway.
I'm with your wife on this point, plus the fact that you cant skip the adds on the various 'free' streaming services like 4 on demand etc.
recording stuff as it is broadcast, then watching it back is far preferable to searching the content out on one of the streaming services and then having to watch all the ads.
I rarely watch 'live' TV anymore, I just watch pre recorded stuff from live tv and skip the ads - I wonder how long before they introduce technology to force me to watch the ads on prerecorded stuff?