Sky Multiroom Advice
We had this question in from Dennis Robinson:
“Sky’s online help is useless for trying to find out what deals they are offering for what money and capability, and I suspect their costly help phone call support are the same.
I am now wondering about us paying to have Sky Multiroom, but without costly HD. If we do, we will have pay for a 2nd Sky plus type box to record one program while watching another one. But I do not know if the box has to be bought through them, at maybe an inflated price.”
Options for Sky in a second room
If you’re looking to be able to watch (and possibly record) Sky in a second room, there are four options:
1. Get one Sky box, and feed the output to a second TV set using aerial cable. You will need to run a co-ax aerial cable from the back of the Sky box to the second TV set’s aerial socket. The TV must support analogue TV for this to work. The downside with this is that you will only be able to watch whatever channel the Sky box is tuned into on both TV sets. You won’t be able to watch Sky One on one telly, and Sky Movies on the other telly at the same time
2. Use a wireless video sender. You will have the same restrictions as Option 1 above, but won’t need to run aerial cable around the home. It uses SCART sockets, so works on either an Analogue or a Digital TV.
3. Get a basic Sky Multiroom box for the second room. This allows you to watch a Sky channel. The basic Multiroom box does not have the built-in Sky+ recording hard drive, so there will be no option to record a second channel at the same time. The basic box does not support HD.
4. Get a Sky+ Multiroom box for the second room. This allows you to watch one Sky channel whilst recording another channel, and supports all of the Sky+ functionality. You can optionally have HD on the second box
You can check the prices for Sky Multiroom here: Sky Multiroom Info & Prices
The Sky+ HD Box with remote control
Connecting Sky Multiroom
We had a supplemental question from Dennis about how to connect Sky Multiroom:
“On a technical-cost point, at present our old Sky dish has a coax cable for our downstairs Sky receiver and another for our upstairs Freesat receiver. My main query then, is do we need another two coax cables to make full use as above, of our then two Sky plus PVR boxes?”
If you want the more expensive Sky+ box for the second room, then Sky will need to run two cables from the dish into the second room. The Sky+ box has two tuners built-in (so you can record one channel whilst you watch a second). As it has two tuners, it needs two feeds from the satellite dish
A Quad Satellite Dish LNB
As for the satellite dish – Normally the dish doesn’t need to be updated, but the LNB (pictured here) may need to be changed. From the picture shown here, you will see an LNB with four sockets – this could support four Sky boxes, or two Sky+ boxes. Some LNBs may only have two, or could have as many as eight.
If you have two Sky+ boxes, you will need two feeds for each box, so at least 4 sockets will be needed on the LNB. If necessary, Sky will upgrade the LNB on the dish as needed, if they install Sky Multiroom for you.
More on Sky Multiroom here: Sky Multiroom Information