Yesterday (October 27th) The long awaited Sky Player was meant to launch on the Xbox 360, this was supposed to make up for the lack of Netflix in the UK.
So at 10am, the Sky Player application launched, and the majority of people couldn’t use it, turns out that the demand for it was massively underestimated by Sky, resulting in their servers not being able to handle the increased traffic. The result was the almost complete collapse of Sky’s IT infrastructure, with Sky Player on PC going down as well.
So the link for the application on the dashboard was hastily replaced by a coming soon advert, which itself was later pulled without explanation. Major Nelson explained on his twitter account:-
“UK Xbox Live Members: If you are having trouble w/ the Sky Player, we are aware of the issues and are investigating.”
Anyway the service is meant to offer on-demand programming, many of it free if you are an exiting Sky subscriber, there is also Live TV available if you already have Sky Multiroom, which is currently £10 a month, but is soon likely to be reduced to £5 a month according to Sky, however Sky 1 is not available, which frankly is a bit mad considering that its the flagship channel!
Of course this does cause me to wonder why Microsoft did not demand a more robust public testing program as they have been doing so with the next Xbox update, which brings Facebook, Last.FM, Zune and twitter to the platform.
Microsoft and Sky expect the service to be back up and running today (28th October), so fingers crossed and we shall see what happens.
Have Fun
Michael
