finally going to ditch sky what next

barnaclebill

after 30 years of sky have decided to save money and ditch it, im on basic sky at £29 a month, its my dish and my sky hd box so the only thing thats theirs is the card, trying to think what to get, humax or manhattan. I have a firestick and can get amazon prime but rarely do. Dont watch sport, like discovery and history and dont watch many movies. My tv aerial on the roof need replacing as no signal but i can get the basic channels on the firestick.

any suggestions.

Bradden

If you have a smart TV you may not need to buy a freeview recorder. Many TV's have a built in decoder and can record to USB.

fordyms

I got a smart tv with freesat, just plug your dish in, don't need an aerial.  USB drive to record/pause live tv.  Also got a 5G router with "3" so ditched Virgin altogether. I think you can get Discovery & History channels via Amazon Prime.

barnaclebill

Sony bravia 55 inch is 10 years old now but working well so still need a box

Peppa537

If you get a freesat box you can plug satellite cables into it and won’t need to get your aerial fixed. I think you can use your Sky HD box to watch the free to air channels although you won’t be able to record, pause on it (please correct me someone if I’m wrong on this). The freesat recordable boxes are more expensive than the freeview though.
We’ve currently got Sky Q but contract ends next month, at the moment I’m just planning on using freesat through the TV, but my TV is less than 2 years old.

Sea_Shell

Can I join in, as we're having similar thoughts at the moment.

We have a dumb TV (which we don't need/want to change), and standard Sky+ HD.  We're out of contract with Sky.

We already have a digital aerial too. *See below 


We've been offered an upgrade to our BB to fibre (Plusnet) which opens up more streaming opportunities.  We're light BB users (no gaming etc.)

We've had a quick look at the Humax boxes (Aura) which would seem to do all what we want, with the benefit of being able to record*/pause etc.

It's Freeview Play rather than Freesat, which I think is new(ish)

We can add Amazon Prime if we wanted.


Any other thoughts or ideas?

Thanks 


*We hate adverts, so we record everything ATM and watch very little live.  I'm guessing with streaming you can't FF through them?

Sea_Shell

Went to retune the TV to our digital aerial, just to check what channels are on there, and we're getting a message "No Aerial detected"

So, somethings come undone or got damaged somewhere...we'll have to investigate.

Hopefully it's not the TV tuner itself, but we have a portable digital aerial which we can try to check that.

We've not needed to use the TV tuner for years and can't remember the last time we had it working!!

No doubt that'll be more ££, if it needs a new or repaired aerial.

Neil_Jones

No such thing as a "digital aerial".  An aerial is an aerial.  Even an unfolded coat hanger can be an aerial.

Sea_Shell

Neil_Jones said:

No such thing as a "digital aerial".  An aerial is an aerial.  Even an unfolded coat hanger can be an aerial.

Maybe I've got my terminology wrong, but I seem to remember we had to "upgrade" our aerial as the analogue signal was being turned off and the old one wouldn't work.

Mister_G

Sea_Shell said:

Neil_Jones said:

No such thing as a "digital aerial".  An aerial is an aerial.  Even an unfolded coat hanger can be an aerial.

Maybe I've got my terminology wrong, but I seem to remember we had to "upgrade" our aerial as the analogue signal was being turned off and the old one wouldn't work.

It's unlikely that a working "analogue aerial" wouldn't work at all for the digital channels.  However, it is possible that there could be some digital channels missing as a result of the Digital Switch Over programme.

Brie

if you're not watching live tv or using iplayer you could also ditch the tv license.