E4 on sky?

markchadwick

It sounds like you don't have freesat from sky, but what is called "free-to-air". From what I gather, you can use a sky box without and cards and still receive several channels as they are broadcast unencrypted. This will be why you can't receive channels 4, 5 and E4. You can, however, buy a sky card from BSkyB for £20 (I think) which enables you to view some extra channels that are encrypted (channels 4 and 5 included). Unfortunately, E4 is not included even with the freesat card installed as there is some legal banter between Sky and Channel 4 which should be changing this year.

You basically have a couple of options:

1. Buy a freesat card from either ebay or BSkyB to get access to the encrypted channels you currently can't view (e.g. C4, C5, plus others) and use a Freeview box to watch E4 when you need to.

2. Buy a freeview box that can enable you to view C4, C5 and E4.

3. Buy a one-off Sky package from Dixons (around £70 I think) that gives you a new sky box + installation + card that can view the encrypted channels. This also gives you 6 month on a sky package for free to try. That's what I have done. In the meantime, we can hope that the legal issues are resolved and E4, etc are broadcast freely. After the 6 months, the card defaults to the £20 freesat card still enabling access to about 200 channels.

Hope this helps.

As an aside, to confuse the matter more, it seems that BBC and ITV are going to launch a new service called "freesat" that is also accessed via Satellite (confusing isn't it?) in 2008. This will need another new set-top box???