Earlier this week Sky UK announced their 2016 price increase and package changes.

As part of those changes it was announced that from the 1st June, all Sky Movies subscribers would be able to view and record Sky Movie channels in HD, without the need to take out the extra “HD” subscription.

A nice “bonus” for people who have the movie channels, but not in HD. And it makes sense with the likes of Netflix and Amazon offering films in HD as standard.

However, those people who are still using an SD sky digibox will have to upgrade to a new Sky HD digibox to be able to take up this option.

Could this be the start of Sky closing down SD channels and moving to HD only?

This move could also be seen as the latest stage against cardsharing.

For many months now, Sky HD channels have not been available on cardsharing system, as the HD channels have an extra layer of encryption, that so far, the “hackers” have not been able to access. By moving channels to HD, and getting their exisitng SD customers to use HD Sky digiboxes, this will mean the loss of Sky Movie channels on cardsharing systems.

Already we know that Sky Italia channels not have been available on cardsharing systems since December 2015, by using this new level of HD encryption. So is this the start of the next stage of Sky UK moving to HD only channels in an attempt to remove their channels from cardsharing? One would assume that if successful with the Movie channels, then the Sports channels would be next…