It all depends what you want .......
A free-to-air sat receiver (costing approx £80, at least for one with "blind-scan", otherwise you're endlessly entering channel details as the channels come and go!) will easily get .....
1) All the Sky non-encrypted channels from Asta 2.
2) All free to air channels from Astra1 (largely German, but a mixture) and from Hotbird (a huge mix). Only a few of these are English (eg, cnbc, subscription only via SKy, but free on Astra1 !). But, there's still a huge amount to watch! My personal fave is Arte channel, the French version of which quite often shows "classic" USA/Brit films with the original soundtrack (and french subtitles). Have recently seen lots of Billy Wilder, Altman, some Russ Meyer, etc.
(Most people want sports, personally I prefer the huge amount of music/ opera on the German channels, but I'm just odd ....... ).
3) For those 3 sats, you'd need a motorised dish, sounds daunting if you haven't done it, but basically a DIY sort of job. Expect to pay something like £250 for the entire setup, remember you're paying no subscriptions (but must have a tv licence of course!).
4) The only thing is, you must check you can "see" all the wanted satellites from your particular ground location, ie there's no trees roofs etc blocking the line-of-signt from dish to satellites.
5) Receivers with CI (condtional access) slots cost very little more than free to air ones (so, most people get one of those anyway!). Then, you can get into CAM and CARD programming, and a vastly greater range of channels becomes available. Although encryption is to force subscription payments (which enable broadcasters to make good quality programmes!), at present it remains legal to do this.
Look all over this website for further info ......
PS, if you can get to your sky dish, and move it, then you can "try out" some other free channels by moving dish, and entering various transponder details into Sky digibox "other channles", but be careful to note previous dish position. To get a satellite, dish must be lined up EXACTLY - unlike a tv aerial - that's easiest done using a "sat bleeper", costing about £10).
