As half a million or so New Zealanders know, Sky’s Digital service died a bit before 6pm yesterday until reviving about 8am this morning (in the middle of my recording the final Gilmore Girls episode, argh). I understand that (rarely) satellites fail, and that errors like this are a huge problem, but will sometimes happen, and that Sky was probably mostly at the mercy of Optus (who own the satellite) here. The response time wasn’t great, but it wasn’t as bad as it could be. My issue is that during the outage, all my MySky box would do is show the “atmospheric conditions” error dialog. I have 60-odd hours of recorded material, which don’t need a live signal to display (or shouldn’t), and couldn’t watch any of it. This should have been the time that MySky shone, because I should have had many hours of material to watch while I couldn’t watch/record live TV. Instead, I was stuck with free-to-air TV like everyone else. Poor design. A “mature” product would not have this flaw. (I think, although I’m not 100%, that my MySky box was accessing the guide - i.e. pulling data from the satellite feed - when things died. Maybe this problem didn’t happen for everyone. I would certainly be interested to know if that was the case). technorati tags: MySky, SkyTV