Quote:
Originally Posted by dragon
another source for the Dish/Box is ebay.
You may need the Freesat card to get some of the FTV channels as although they are Free To View they are not Free To Air (i.e unencrypted)
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There is no such thing as a Freesat card. It's important to maintain the distinction here between two quite different branded 'Free' satellite services now available in the UK.
Freesat is a joint venture between BBC and ITV. It is not connected with Freeview in any way, except that the principle is similar, to allow people to access free digital TV with nothing to pay other than the cost of the equipment and installation. Freesat set-top-boxes do not typically even have a card slot installed.
Freesat-From-Sky (sometimes called FSFS) is what you're left with when you cease your Sky subscription; basically the five Public Service Broadcasters (BBC1-4, ITV 1-4, and all of the channels from C4 and Five) and a shed-load of third-rate travel, movie and shopping channels nobody watches anyway.
If you acquire a secondhand Sky box and want to use it without a subscription then Sky will send you a card to use it as a FSFS box but the card will cost you £20.
All of the public service broadcasters except Five have now switched from Free-to-view to Free-to-air broadcasting, so even with a Sky box you no longer require a card to decode and view them. Five are committed to switching over to FTA broadcasting soon (expected before the end of this year) once they have sorted out certain rights issues.
Apart from Five, the only difference now between the channel line-up on Freesat and the line up on FSFS is that loads of the gash that nobody watches anyway isn't there (yet). Freesat launched with 80 channels and is committed to progressively adding all the other FTA channels that broadcast to the UK, so that eventually (again, they hope, by the end of the year) there will be little difference in the line up on the two services.
From the beginning of 2009 onwards, I think there are two main benefits to taking Freesat over FSFS:
1. Sky have suggested that they may not want to add any more channels to their EPG; Freesat seem keen to add as much as they can get their hands on; therefore in the long term the free channel line up on Freeview is likely to be better than FSFS. That is, if you gauge how good something is by quantity rather than quality ...
2. Even if you never take a subscription out on your secondhand Sky box, all the Sky subscription channels will always appear in your EPG, just cluttering it up and getting in the way. You can of course mitigate this a little by setting favourites but they are limited in number and if you want to channel hop with the ch+ and ch- buttons on your remote, it will still take you through all the channels you don't have.
To cut a long story short - I have just bought a new Goodmans Freesat box for our holiday flat, which doesn't have a dish, and I have paid a local installer to put a dish up. I have been trialling the box at home and I'm very happy with it.
Have a look at this thread here to find out more:
http://www.cableforum.co.uk/board/64...on-photos.html
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