Barty’s Weblog

I must confess that I have a pretty good home theatre set up for video gaming and for watching the odd movie.

The whole set up is powered by a Sony amp and everything (literally) runs through the amp including all the video and sound. Unfortunately one of the down sides with using an amp for video is that TV’s with Freeview built-in are pointless, so last year I purchased Freeview HD to enjoy television in high definition.

But overall, I was disappointed with the lack of HD programs that were broadcast on the Freeview channels. TV3 was excellent, but most of the TV1 and TV2 programs weren’t high definition at all. After a while I began to leave Freeview turned off and just reverted to using the old trusty Sky TV decoder. It just wasn’t worth the hassle of using an extra remote and changing the input on the amp just to watch something in slightly better resolution.

But I recently upgraded our Sky decoder to the My Sky HDi decoder and I’ve not looked back. With My Sky HDi you get SKY Sport 1, SKY Sport 2, SKY Movies, SKY Movies Greats and TV3 in proper high definition. It’s beautiful.. and watching the Black Caps in high definition has been nothing short of brilliant.

On top of the “high def goodness” you get cool features like recording your favourite programs and the live pause (which gets handier every day). You can even record two channels at once and watch a third and I must confess to even achieving that feat once so far.

My Sky HDi is so handy, it has changed my TV viewing habits. I no longer sit down at scheduled times each week to catch my favourite shows. I use MySky to record the series each week and leave it to it.

When I want to watch some TV, I don’t channel surf or settle for whatever is on — I flick through my recorded programs and watch something I really wanted to watch. The result is that I now watch less TV.

Kudos to Sky TV… My Sky HDi is a great piece of technology that makes life easier.