Fresh Plastic

Want Sky Movies for 83p per month? It's possible! Here's how...

I've written a few times before about Now TV, the Now TV box and the cheap deals that can be had. So, I'll spare you much of that on this occasion. Instead I'll jump right on in and give you the bare facts.

Sky Movies is available via Sky's internet streaming service Now TV. Since the service launched it has always been much cheaper to subscribe via Now TV than it has been to subscribe via Sky satellite or Virgin cable. And Now is now even cheaper...

Currently shops such as Tesco, Sainsbury's, Currys/PC World and e-tailer Shop.To are selling Now TV set-top-boxes - with 3 months Sky Movies (via included voucher) - from £12.49 to £12.99. The box itself normally retails for £9.99, and offers BBC iPlayer, ITV Player, 4OD and Demand 5 as well, as a bonus.

If you want the box, the deal makes Sky Movies effectively 83p per month! If you don't want nor need the box (maybe as you're an existing customer and/or prefer watching on another device) it's still cheaper to get the bundle as £4.16 per month (£12.49 / 3) still beats the usual price of £7.99 hands down. You can then either keep the box as a spare or sell it on (I hear CEX are buying them for £7!) Batteries and HDMI cable are included, which is none too shabby.

You can register up to 4 devices with one Now TV account - and view simultaneously on two of them. So, for £50 (4 bundles @ £12.50 each) you could fit out your home with free catch-up telly and a year's worth of movies.

Don't like movies? First of all, what's wrong with you?!? Secondly, Now TV also have an Entertainment Pack that works like the Sky Movies one. Same price, different channels and four months instead of three. Featuring the likes of Sky1, Fox, MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon, it's ideal for those heading off to uni in September. A year will only set you back £37.50, and, if only the on-demand programmes, rather than the live channels, are viewed, a £145.50 TV Licence won't be neccessary. Saving them, or their parents, £108 in the process.

A year of what was LOVEFiLM, (now the catchier Amazon Prime Instant Video) for £49

Goodbye LOVEFiLM, hello Amazon Prime Instant Video!

Amazon have decided to rechristen 'LOVEFiLM Instant', the video-on-demand portion of the DVDs-by-post company they bought years ago, 'Amazon Prime Instant Video'. Not only that, but - as the name suggests - they've merged it with Amazon Prime. Amazon Prime, for the uninitiated, is/was a service that gave Amazon shoppers 'free' one day delivery for a year for an upfront cost.

That's all well and good, I hear you say, but what does it mean? In a nutshell, the facts about Amazon Prime Instant Video:

• Was LOVEFiLM Instant
• Now not LOVEFiLM Instant
• Cheaper than Netflix if you sign up today
• Not cheaper than Netflix if you sign up tomorrow
• Cheaper than a Sky Movies Pass on NOW TV - if you sign up today or even tomorrow
• Not cheaper than NOW TV's Entertainment Pass tomorrow, but is today
• Well and truly cheaper than having both Movies and Entertainment packs on NOW TV
• Staler films and TV show than those found on NOW TV, but a lot more plentiful
• Includes a bunch of Kindle books to borrow
• As well as 'free' one day delivery on 'millions' of real, tangible items available on Amazon

 

Here's the results of some (very basic) number-crunching I've done...

Netflix = £5.99 pm (£71.88 pa)
Sky Movies on NOW TV = £8.99 pm (£107.88 pa)
Entertainment NOW TV  = £4.99 pm (£59.88 pa)
Amazon Prime Instant (today) = £4.08 pm (£49.00 pa) 
Amazon Prime Instant (tomorrow) = £6.58 pm (£79.00 pa)

Whilst doing those sums I found out NOW TV are offering new bundles that make that service even cheaper - plus you get a new/extra set-top-box to boot. It's a bit too confusing to work into my above number-crunching, so I've left it out. See below instead...

5 months of Sky Movies on NOW TV would normally be £44.95 (£8.99 x 5). However, if you choose the bundle option on NOW TV's site you'll only pay £34.99. And, like I said, that includes their NOW TV box (which usually retails at £9.99). Not only that, the dinky box also provides access to the catch-up services BBC iPlayer, 4OD and Demand 5.

Remember, if you don't watch (or record) any television as it is broadcast, you don't need a TV licence! That's £145.50 you could be spending on some quality on-demand viewing instead. Don't forget a licence ISN'T even required if you watch the likes of iPlayer. So, you can still watch the majority of the UK's most popular TV shows without one - legally!

Hacking Netflix whilst legally avoiding paying a penny to TV Licensing: A year in review

Happy New Year, and all that jazz. Welcome to my first post of 2014 - and a very belated Year in Review.

In 2013 the two most popular pages on this here blog of mine were Open up a whole new world of TV and film with this little Netflix 'hack' and How to legally avoid paying the TV licence whilst still watching lots of TV.

Almost all of those who ended up here did so after searching for Netflix hacks and ways to avoid paying the ridiculous TV licence the UK has. So expect more posts on both in the future.

After TV Licensing and Netflix, my posts on the pros and cons of Sky's Now TV service - which included how to watch Sky Movies on the cheap and how The Simpsons were missing from it - proved the next most popular. Again, expect more upcoming posts on that.

Breaking away from moneysaving film and television tips, the next most searched for, and read, post was about the awful mess that was made to my Dell Latitude 10 tablet after I updated it to Windows 8.1. Dell themselves dropped by and, not long after, the problem was fixed for all of us poor souls affected by it (which was pretty much everyone who upgraded). Don't expect any more posts on that!

And finally...

What's been missing is a bit of banter, some dialogue. Feel free to comment, I publish all I receive unless they're from bots or human spammers. Heck, I even published this rather patronising, condescending nonsense from a company that ripped off my sister's mobile phone.

Open up a whole new world of TV and film with this little Netflix 'hack'

Got Netflix? Got a little bored with their limited content? Well, I can help you with that! There's two easy ways to get a world of Netflix, opening up hundreds - if not thousands - more movies and TV shows.

Firstly, the free method:

If you're using Google's Chrome browser you can install an extension called 'Hola'. This allows you to select, from a drop down menu, a different country for you to appear to be from when visiting websites. This little picture explains it bit better...

So, if you're in the UK and wanted to watch, say, Cartoon Network's 'Adventure Time' - which isn't available on UK Netflix - you'd simply sign in to netflix.com, click on the fire-faced fella in the top right of your browser, select 'US' and refresh the page. That's it!

Before...

After...

And now the pay way:

If that's so easy, free and works, why would you want to pay? Simple - Hola only works in the browser. You can't use it on Wii, PS3, Xbox 360, set-top-box or smart TV. For those you'll need something like Unblock Us, which costs around £3 per month.

Unblock Us will work with pretty much any device that allows you to change DNS settings. Don't worry if you don't know anything about DNS settings, I didn't until I started using the service. Usually it just involves going into a device's internet settings and changing two lines of numbers. That's it! I've done this with various tablets, Google TV, Xbox 360 and a Wii. Sadly it won't work on Roku as that doesn't allow you to change such things.

Once you've entered Unblock Us's DNS numbers, it's just a matter of changing the Neflix country you wish to watch content from. This can be done on anything that has a browser and is connected to the same network.

 

As an example, here's a bunch of Brazilian movies you can't see in Blighty, usually!

So, there you have it. A whole new world of Netflix has opened up - all for no extra cost, or just £3. On top of that you'll also have access to dozens of other streaming sites - such as the US and Canadian equivalents of iPlayer: Hulu and CTV Player. These are great if you want to see some of the best American shows a day or two after they air over there. I use CTV Player for my fix of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, and Hulu for the (original) Israeli version of Homeland - 'Prisoners'.

Ditch the dish! Sky Movies 'NOW' practically given away on the internet.

There was a time, not long ago, when one had no choice but to subscribe to a gazillion entertainment channels one did not desire just to see a handful of few film channels one did. A time when subscribers were denied said channels in HD unless they stumped up an additional £10 fee.

Well friends, that time is over.  Now NOW TV is here Sky Movies is as cheap as it was in the 80s. NOW, the Sky-by-broadband service has seriously undercut the Sky-by-satellite service. And, the oddest thing about all this is, they're both the same company!

So, how much cheaper is Sky Movies on NOW? Glad you asked! Here ya go...

Sky Movies, per month, in HD on one TV:

• On Sky, £53
• On NOW, £9 

Sky Movies, per month, in HD on two TVs:

• On Sky, £65
• On NOW, £9

I've rounded prices to the nearest pound and haven't taken into account any special offers. For further savings, if you only watch on demand programming and no broadcasts, you can stop paying £145 a year to TV Licensing. And, if you're watching Sky Movies on NOW TV's dinky box, you can expect lower electric bills than those using a Sky+HD box.

At the moment, retailers such as Argos are offering the NOW TV set-top-box - bundled with 3 months Sky Movies - for £25. And additional boxes can be bought for £10 direct from the NOW TV site. More on the box and what other goodies it delivers in my next post.

At a glance, pros and cons...

Pros:

• Content is in 720p HD. On Sky's satellite service there's a £10 HD fee on top of the subscription cost
• Content can be viewed on any two of four registered devices at the same time. On Sky's satellite service there's an £11.25 'multiscreen' fee, again, on top of the subscription cost
• NOW TV remembers where you stopped watching and lets you continue where you left off on any one of those four devices

Cons:

• No subtitles
• No audio description for the visually impaired
• Netflix offers better quality pictures and apparently allows limitless registered devices

Sky Movies HD 'NOW' *£50* cheaper per month. No dish. No cable.

Like films, but neither LOVEFiLM nor Netflix whet your appetite, with their lack of recent movies? Sky too expensive? I hear ya. But wait! Sky's own internet TV service - NOW TV - is currently undercutting their satellite service, offering Sky Movies for a whopping £50 less per month.

Yes folks you read that right. Fifty pounds less! Sure you don't get hundreds of extra channels or a Sky+HD box, but if you don't want nor need all that then this is an incredible saving.

Here's the skinny...

Sky Movies HD via Sky TV: £52.75 per month (12 months contract)

Sky Movies HD via Now TV: £2.50 per month (6 months contract)

I'm no financial expert, but this would appear to be quite a substantial saving. But it gets better! If you sign up for NOW TV via cashback site Quidco you may well get £15 back*, making that half a year of Sky Movies for absolutely zero cost.

The price goes up to £15 per month after month six, so you may want to set yourself a reminder to cancel. And you'll need some kind of gadget to watch this on. Unlike Netflix, NOW TV isn't available for many Android phones and tablets. It's not available on Google TV either. But iThingies, PS3s and Xbox 360s** are supported.

Offer ends on the 27th of May. Which is just days away - but I'm sure they'll be another one when this one's over.

*Never rely on cashback from Quidco. Treat it as a bonus if you get

**Xbox Live Gold is also required, at additional cost, if you don't already have it.