Sky Player On Mac – Quick Review

Sky have been promoting their Sky Player service for quite some time.
At the moment you can access it on the XBox, though for some odd reason the XBox version doesn’t have access to the “premium” content ie. Sky Box Office.

So if, like me, you don’t have a phone line setup with your Sky box and you don’t run Windows, your options are a bit limited.

You can, however, watch Sky Box Office on your desktop.

Word of warning. To use the Sky Player you will need to have the latest version of Microsoft’s Silverlight installed.

For some bizarre reason the player will load fine in Firefox, but trying to watch anything using Firefox will not work. You might have better luck than me, but I ended up switching to Safari. In Firefox it seemed to be stuck permanently “buffering”.

So what’s the experience like?

To be honest I can’t really complain. I’m using a 27″ iMac, so once I was in a comfortable chair I was able to enjoy a couple of films without any issues. You can easily view the films in full screen view and the quality on a 27″ screen was fine. It wasn’t as good as watching on my TV with my full surround sound, but that was my choice (albeit one dictated by circumstance).

Renting films is pretty easy. Once you have an online account with Sky you can signup for their “wallet”, which you can add funds to in order to watch films and other paid content.

It is unfortunate that the standalone player software is not available for the Mac as I suspect it might give more options in terms of quality and control. The Silverlight powered stream works fine, but has very little in the way of controls.

All in all it’s not an unpleasant way to watch Sky Box Office films legally!