A Warning For All Sky TV Customers

If you're a Sky TV customer, you'll be used to getting the monthly Sky Magazine through your door, looking at the cover, realising it looks boring, and dumping it straight in the bin.

This month, however, make an exception. You'll notice that it comes with a letter, in colourful blue and green, with "We've Frozen Your Price" bannered across it, assuring you that "you can enjoy peace of mind for the next 12 months".

99% of people won't read the letter, or might skim it to get the gist of it, then forget all about it. However, it has a very nasty sting.

The upshot of it is thus. At the moment, you can choose from six "mixes" of channels, loosely grouped into category. You pay £19.50 for the first mix, then another £1 for each extra one you wish to add, up to a total of £25.50 for all six.

Sky are rejigging the packages, so that from now on there will only be two packages - "Entertainment", costing £20 a month, and "Entertainment Extra" at £25 a month. The first of these two contains not many channels at all - in fact many of the channels can be picked up for nothing on Freeview. Anyone wanting music channels (except MTV), or any kids' channels, things like Nat Geo, Bio, Discovery, or even Sky News will need to pay the whole £25.

In fact, channels like 4Music, Yesterday, and even Sky News are completely free on Freeview, but not available on the new £20 package.

Personally, I subscribe to the Variety and Music mixes for £20.50 a month. I'm not interested in documentaries, kids, style and culture, or news and events. But I have two choices this time next year. I can pay an extra £4.50 a month to keep the channels I have now, or I can save 50p and lose nearly half of the channels I currently pay for.

Sky are saying that you'll get "more channels" for your current price, which is true for the next 12 months, due to them putting you on the new Entertainment Extra package for the same price as you're currently paying - however they're banking on you forgetting in a years' time, and not noticing that your bills have risen by up to £5.50 a month when your "price freeze" ends. Of course, they legally have to give you 30 days notice of any changes, which they will have done by informing you now, so they won't need to inform you again when it actually rises.

It's also worth noting, of course, that Sky raised line rental to their landline customers by £1 a month earlier this year, and most TV subscriptions and the HD pack by around 50p each at the beginning of this year.

So beware. Indeed, enjoy the extra channels that you'll be getting for now. But put in your diary for a year's time to check out the options available to you, such as Freeview, TalkTalk TV, or Virgin Media if you're in a cabled area - because if you're not canny about it by auditing what channels you actually use, you could end up £60 a year worse off by paying for stuff you never watch.

If you've got any thoughts on this, please do comment below.

Is The Web Making Us Less Social?

I've had a very social day today. Not in the real sense, in fact I haven't seen a single person all day - more in a contemplatory sense. You see, as a result of getting a Google+ invite, I've been thinking about social networking.

Everybody's friend, MySpace Tom

There's no dispute that Facebook and Twitter are the kings of the social networking world - Facebook for people you actually know, and Twitter more for following and interacting with organisations, brands, and "concepts".

Dealing with two social network sites is enough - but it's increasingly becoming the case that everyone wants a piece of the social pie. Myspace is still clinging on for dear life after splitting away from its guardian angel disguised as Rupert Murdoch, Bebo is doing pretty much the same after running screaming from AOL, and Yahoo's 360 service is a long distant memory.

It now seems that Google wants to claim its place in the market with its new offering, Google+ (or Google Plus if you want to use words rather than symbols). It's worth pointing out that Google's previous foray into this whole thing, Orkut, is still alive. Not kicking, but still alive.

The whole problem about social networking, is that for it to work effectively, everyone has to be in the same place. Think of the internet as a city, and each social network website as a nightclub. If there was only one nightclub, everyone would be in it, and everyone would speak to each other. As it is, there are many - some big, some small - and each one is competing for your custom.

I have some friends on Facebook, some on Twitter, some on both (automatically posting the same updates to make sure that everyone sees it). And this is where the problems start to creep in. If you only check one site, you miss all the stuff on the other. If you check two sites, you risk seeing the same stuff more than once and getting bogged down in repeats.

Imagine for a second that there was only one social network. Things would be a lot simpler. I could post my inane witterings in one place, and everything would flow quite nicely from there.

An ideal point of concept here is YouTube. Let's say I post a video on YouTube. It automatically adds itself to my Google+ profile, because Google owns YouTube. Facebook also decides that it's worthy of being seen by my friends, and so it ends up auto-posted there too. Twitter then decides to claim it, and posts a tweet and link to it. Before I know it, there are at least four places where people can access my video - which is great - but there are also four places where people can leave comments, meaning that there are four places I need to check if I want to see what's been written.

This, in turn, gives rise to the whole thing of "I posted a comment on your video, did you read it?". "No, where did you post it?" "Under your video" "Yes, but on which site?" "It was on YouTube". "YouTube.com, or YouTube embedded in Facebook?" "Uh, I was on Facebook and clicked a link". "So did you post it under the video still playing on Facebook, or did the whole page take you to YouTube?" "Uh... I don't know." "So what did your comment say?" "Nice video."

Talk about data overload.