Announced earlier in the year, BSkyB have now launched their SkybyBroadband website, giving a hint to its customers as to what to expect from the service. However, there are already calls of concern that the strain such a service will place on the ADSL network will make contention a realism for 1000's of users across the country.

SkybyBroadband enables current Sky Digital viewers who subscribe to the Movies package and/or the Sports package, the opportunity to additionally download content to their home PCs, free of charge. Sky are quoting users on a 1Mbps service could download a 2 hour movie title in as little as 2 or 3 hours, equating to a filesize of between 120MB and 180MB. By the same ratio 2Mbps customers could download the file in as little as an hour and 8Mbps connections in under 15 minutes. ADSL2+ users could obviously see the most dramatic download rate - downloading the entire movie in under 5 minutes. Content will be encoded at bit rate of 860kbps, and resolution of 540x432 - hardly DVD or HighDefinition quality but we suspect perfectly adequate for the job in hand.

Its believed that 100's of movie titles and sports coverage will be available from launch, all through 3rd party software by Kontiki, who specialise in securing distributed media preventing it from being duplicated. Once downloaded, the title will be available on the PC only, and the presence of the software from Kontiki implies that export to separate media such as DVD will not be legally possible. Content will typically be licensed for up to 30 days for movies (7 days for sports coverage), and can also benefit from Parental Controls.

Unlikely to stem the demand on the traditional illegal Peer2Peer/BitTorrent sharing, SkybyBroadband does open an additional channel for end users to make effective use of their high speed connections at home. With some 4million of Sky subscribers qualifying for access, it would be fair to say that a high number of those subscribers will also have a broadband service at home and contention could ultimately not only impact those impressive download times we mentioned earlier, but potentially degrade other users ADSL services - even those not using the SkybyBroadband service. Contention is still a bit of a anomalous entity for many users in the UK - failing to understand that in the main, there's only so much bandwidth available from each exchange, and that this bandwidth is shared between users. For those interested, we can do no better than to let Plusnet explain the concept here - bizarrely, by comparing contention with pizza.

You can sign up now with SkybyBroadband in preparation of the services full launch, by visiting SkybyBroadband.com