"Essjay001" wrote in message
...
Tim Mitchell wrote:
In article , Brendan DJ Murphy
writes
have you considered a satellite dish instead?

If you dont want to subscribe to Murdoch's empire, you can still get
a dish and digibox without subscription and
You can get BBC, ITV and CH4 without subscription.

I'm not sure this is true any more, I don't believe you can get ITV /
C4 / C5 on dsat without a subscription since a couple of weeks ago,
because nobody is issuing the cards any more.

Yes you can I have been watching terrestrial tv through a satdish for
about
six months now

If you have a FTV card (ie. not a Sky subscription), then I'm pretty sure
you'll find that you'll lose all non BBC channels shortly.

As of July 11th, BBC moved from FTV (encrypted and need a 'free' card) to
FTA (no encryption, no card needed). BBC was the major source of cash for
the card issuance, and now that BBC have pulled out of that (no need for
cards, so why should the BBC fund it), the FTV market has collapsed (ie. you
can no longer get any more FTV cards). This means that you can't get a new
card.

There's also some dispute about the future. Some people (even with the 2nd
issue Sky cards who have closed their subscription and are now just FTV
cards) have found that ITV, C4 and C5 are now no longer viewable without a
full Sky subscription. AFAIK, these channels are now pulling out of the FTV
market (without a card issuer - there is no future in FTV) and will shortly
(if not already) require a full Sky subscription to get ITV, C4 and C5.

Any dispute about this? Don't ask me - go to uk.tech.digital-tv where this
has been discussed to death for months.

D