As for the remotes – the Vodafone remote looks nice, but isn’t practical in use – operating entirely by touch is tricky. The Sky remote has raised buttons that are far easier to navigate without looking, or by the vision impaired.

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I’m fond of the simplicity of the Sky interface but adore the Vodafone’s UI. It’s a little fiddly here and there but has a number of little flourishes that SKY currently can’t deliver on their STB (like the posters in the guide). It all looks like a high-end MediaPortal theme and I’m all for that (it also doesn’t appear to fall over quite as frequently as MediaPortal either).

The 20-second skip is handy and fast-forward / rewind with thumbnails is a nice touch (if a little too unwieldy at higher speeds compared to the Sky box).

For the streaming services, unfortunately there is absolutely nothing here that you can get anywhere else. For all the talk of ‘everything in one’ place, you still have to trundle over to the apps section and open Netflix or Prime as a separate app. Each app still also has it’s own interface and way of doing things too, so don’t expect it to integrate as tightly into the dashboard as the Sky service does. Obviously, with their commercial partnership, Sky would naturally want things this way around.

Search appears to filter the TV guide and a ‘Sky Go’ equivalent and doesn’t extend to other services. TVNZ OnDemand is left out in the cold and so is Netflix, and Amazon Prime. You still have to look through every service to find the show you want to watch, something that is always going to be faster to do on a laptop instead of on-screen keyboard from a remote. Global search would be technology likened to witchcraft here but is something that isn’t going to happen with each platform offering their own catalog / service.