Locked up? Time to find the ultimate TV package
Home entertainment has never been a more important distraction, and we have the lowdown
Tis a great movie. But it’s the last thing anyone will want to look at over the next few months of our collective incarceration. With most of us stuck at home, those prison scenes will be too close to everyday life for comfort. And at least the prisoners were allowed a bit of social interaction during meals and exercise hour!
Thankfully, there are plenty of great movies that are not set in jails. In fact we’ve never had more brilliant entertainment at our fingertips than we do now.
There’s an ever-growing list of streaming services some of which are challenging Hollywood for the best drama around with their own content.
And to stream the content and enable us to work at home, we need good broadband.
We also need to keep in contact with loved ones at home and abroad by phone or video calls.
Then to cap it all, with an unprecedented economic crisis coming down the tracks, we need to save money.
The answer to all of these problems is what the industry calls ‘triple play’ deals where you get TV, broadband and a landline in the same package.
You probably have one of these already. But if you have, you are also probably paying too much for it, up to nearly twice as much as you need to.
I know we bang on about this a lot, but it really has to be said: if you stay, you pay. The TV/broadband/ phone market is like many others. You get a discount for a year to lure you in, then you get hammered. But you can save a fortune by switching, which 85% of people never do! Yada, yada yada.
The point is that even if you have a triple play deal, it would probably pay to switch to a new provider anyway, or at least to threaten to.
The last time I switched from Sky to Virgin (before switching back later) Sky offered me a new deal that was much better than what I was about to pay, but was just short of the new Virgin offering.
So look into what’s on offer – even if only to squeeze a better deal out of your current provider.
(If you’re worried about service people coming into your home see panel on what protocols providers adopt in the crisis.)
It’s also worth getting any requests in early, before your contract expires as there may well be delays in getting engineers out – and even in dealing with queries.
If you’re with Virgin, on €89 a month (post discount), you could switch to Eir, for example, for €50 a month, plus some tasty freebies.
Paying for a TV service on its own isn’t much cheaper than triple play – unless you install a free-to-air satellite dish.
And they practically throw in the landline for free – with free calls too in many cases – so you might as well get that too.
But which one should we choose to get the best value? That really depends on your preferences.
Sky and Virgin dominate the market. They are the platforms that most people know and trust. They used to come out with cheap deals intermittently but seem to have stopped that, relying entirely on customer inertia and brand power to keep customers in line.
Vodafone and Eir are trying hard to lure customers with cheaper deals, particularly Eir, which has a host of freebies to boot.
So let’s look at what’s on offer with the cheapest deals first.
EIR 63 CHANNELS
Eir is offering more snazzy gimmicks than a new Transformers movie in order to lure customers from the ‘Big Two’ of Virgin and Sky. It also has the cheapest triple play deal at €40 a month, which works out at €480 for the first year.
It offers a new Apple TV set-top box plus the Apple TV service – plus Amazon Prime Video.
In normal times, that would seem like overkill, but an awful lot of families are now desperate for new TV content. We’re only a few weeks into the ‘lock up’, so a couple of new streaming services might come in awfully handy when you’re trying to keep the kids entertained... and work at the same time.
For an extra tenner a month you can get 81 channels instead of 63.
VODAFONE 57/84 CHANNELS
In the triple play market one of the things to watch out for is short term monthly payment offers.
For example, Vodafone seems to have a startlingly cheap deal at €25 a month. But that jumps to €70 monthly after six months which tots up to €570 in year one.
That’s still a lot cheaper than Sky (€815) and Virgin (€750). But Eir is cheaper still and has lots more bells and whistles. Vodafone is a wellrespected brand in telecoms. Its TV platform may not be as well-established as other services. It is still a bit of an unknown quantity and it needs to come up with a better pitch if it is going to get people to switch.
Normally, Vodafone offers 57 channels, but you can get that bumped up to 83 for the same price if you book online.
VIRGIN MEDIA 66 CHANNELS
Virgin has a very compelling sales pitch, especially during this extended stay-at-home crisis – fast broadband.
Even its cheapest deal – Virgin Mix 250 – provides broadband up to two-and-a-half times faster than most other providers (as it is on a dedicated cable).
Pay an extra tenner a month for Virgin Mix 500 and you’ll get broadband that is, on paper, up to five times faster than the 100mb broadband connection provided by most rivals. The 500Mb package also includes a total of 114 TV channels compared to 66 for the basic deal.
‘Virgin are Ireland’s fastest network if you need a super-fast connection,’ says Eoin Clarke, boss of Switcher.ie. And that is exactly what many people do need after hundreds of thousands of us suddenly started working from home, straining broadband services to the limit.
However, anecdotally, we are hearing that speeds of 15mbs are enough for Zoom or Skype conferences.
SKY 90 CHANNELS
Sky’s extensive platform with 90 channels on the basic package is well-known and liked and comes with great exclusive drama content such as Chernobyl and Game Of Thrones.
But it also has the dearest triple play deal at present, starting at €65 a month. Sky normally offers cheaper deals at around €45/€50 a
month periodically but hasn’t done so in a while and the current deal €65 offer has been extended to May 28.
So maybe Sky has decided it doesn’t have to compete on price with Vodafone and Eir because enough customers will stick with what they know – i.e. Sky and Virgin. Meanwhile Virgin hasn’t come up with any cheap deals lately either, so there’s a bit of a competitive lapse between the Big Two at this point.
Sky can rely on the appeal of its extensive movie offerings, which will be in big demand in the coming weeks.
With cinemas shutting down across the globe, streaming firms and TV movie channels will come into their own and the bigger outfits, like Sky, should be able to negotiate unprecedented access to new releases.
Sky has just announced that it will stream a range of movies on the same day as global premieres. ‘This will begin with DreamWorks Animation’s Trolls World Tour on 6 April,’ it says.
STREAMING
Streaming platforms were set to take over from traditional TV. Now they are really going to take off as beleaguered families are forced to effectively replace childminders with Netflix as they try to work from home.
‘Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Now TV all have an impressive collection of movies and TV shows, while Disney+ has just launched in Ireland this week, which could be a godsend if you’ve got children to keep occupied,’ says Mr Clarke of Switcher.ie.
‘It has thousands of family films and TV series and you can sign up for a seven-day free trial.
‘If you want to get a great broadband and digital TV deal together there are some great offers to avail of, Eir are offering a year of Amazon Prime Video for free.’
We covered streaming services last week, including prices so we won’t go into that again. But its worth noting that Netflix and other streaming services have downgraded their Ultra HD and HD offerings to help cope with demand, so there is no point in paying extra for that.
However, the €7.99 a month basic package is good value, particularly as there is a 30 day free trial period. Amazon Prime is only €5.99 a month and newbie Apple TV+ is €4.99, both with a seven-day free trial period.
Sky’s streaming service Now TV is pricey at €15 a month, depending on the package, but there is a 50% discount for six months, which should see us through this crisis.
Disney+ is €6.99 a month or €69.99 a year which I would normally balk at but in the current entertainment crisis maybe it is worth paying to keep the kids happy.