Alternatives to Sky

T

TailgunnerUK

Member
My Satellite Setup
SKY+
My Location
Ayrshire
Hi

I am looking for some assistance as I wish to purchase a motorised system as an alternative to SKY. I currently have SKY but wish to ditch it - I object to pricing etc and being forced to take channels I don't really want and am not bothered about receiving the majority of channels available on Sky.
I live in Saltcoats in Ayrshire in Scotland.
Any help or feedback as to a system set-up would be appreciated.

Regards

Neil
 
The answer(s) will depend very much upon your interests.

Can you tell us more?
 
Also on what budget you may have.
 
Hi

News channels, general entertainment, some kids channels and music channels.

Budget - under £300

Thanks
 
TailgunnerUK said:
Hi

News channels, general entertainment, some kids channels and music channels.

Budget - under £300

Thanks
Click to expand...

Pull the card out of your sky box and see what channels are still available. Theres a reasonable choice of news, kids, and kids channels available in the clear. Plus a few movie channels. Mentally add back Fiver /+1, Five USA / +1, Sky 3, and Viva which an expired card will give you.

You may find that those channels are sufficient for your needs.

Entertainment is a bit more problematical - you will need a subscription for a good choice of general entertainment channels - which will bust your budget if you need to buy equipment as well.
 
Firstly, if you retain your Sky digibox, you will still be able to watch a good selection of channels in English without subscription, adding a motorised dish and searching for FTA channels will yield precious little in English and as all but one package are at present secure, even software patchable receivers or CAMs won't add much to it.

So you are then looking at either a subscription to a foreign language broadcaster who shows some English language material, or buying a receiver suitable for card sharing and doing a bit of learning.
 
If the OP is used to fiddling with computers and has a logical mind, the Linux based receivers used for card sharing will be easy enough to learn. See the FAQ here.

Otherwise there will be a bit of a learning curve.

The Technisat HDFS Freesat HD receiver has the Freesat EPG, diesqc 1.2 and records onto any external hard drive or flash drive using USB. I don't know much about using it for multi-satellite use but it has already won awards and is worth checking out.
 
Got one here, not really played with it yet, but for the FTA channels on Astra 28.2, the Sky digibox with the expired card offers more channels.
 
It is not clear if it has blind scan. If it does not, that would not be good.

It does seem to have some kind of network scan that only works on the Freesat NIT in the EPG channel, to keep the Freesat channels up to date.

Still, it looks nice!


:-carrot
 
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