Satellite TV on my PC - How is this possible?

If you're new to this then you have some exciting times ahead.

There is a huge fuss being made in the media at the moment about claims of 'Free satellite TV on your PC' or 'Free Sky on the Internet' services. A lot of it is just the usual Media Hype, but the TV companies are starting to take notice. In fact, they've been watching for quite a while.

Are you confused about what's possible? Do you just want the bottom line on how (or even if) it works?

That's quite easy.

You can either have the video and audio streamed over an IP network (the Internet, or your home LAN if you have one) or you can receive it from a satellite. Only the latter is real 'satellite TV'.

The rest of it is usually very poor quality viewing and very unreliable.

Why do you think that most of the companies and websites offering this kind of service want a one-time, up-front membership fee?

If there weren't so many of them, they would probably be quite rich by now!

To be perfectly honest, a very few of them do provide some sort of watchable service, but it's still not very reliable. They normally get their feeds from places like China. Whilst there's nothing wrong with that, you can imagine that there are even more technological and logistical problems than a domestic-based provider. It's insecure, messy and busy. The sources change regularly as they are shut down by the 'net police.

So what does that mean to me?

Well, of course you have a choice. Real satellite TV to your PC. Directly. No middle man, no 'server busy, please try later'. No here-today, gone-tomorrow lifetime subscription services and no worries about who's knocking on your door - it's completely legal if you just want to watch the free to air (FTA) channels.

There is no 'Free Sky TV'. If that was the case, there would be nobody left paying for it!

What you can do, is have a heap of fun grabbing all the free TV that's out there (...and there's a lot...) and stay completely legal.

Of course, if you want to get free Premiership football, movies, porn or whatever then you can do that too, but that's not what this is about. You can add those for nothing later.

This is about a simple, standard and well-proven piece of hardware which plugs into either a vacant PCI slot in your motherboard, or a free USB port. Although the latter might sound appealing, far better results are generally achieved using the PCI card. It's just a faster
device.

A Skystar 1 or 2 card will provide the required platform to get the pictures onto your PC screen. It's so cheap, it's ridiculous! The only other thing you need is a satellite dish. That will rule this option out for some people, but it's no big deal for most. You can even piggy-back off your existing dish.

I should say that we're not selling anything here. We're just here to help you have some fun. You can source these cards very easily, cheaply and legally from the UK and all over Europe. They are also used to receive 'Internet by satellite' data links.

One of the best things about the Technisat Skystar 2 (the cheaper of the two) is that it will even decode HDTV (though not the new Sky channels, as they use a different system) and live 4:2:2 feeds.

How much? Around £45 new.

Go and have a scout around and see what you can get one for. Then come back here and we'll help you set it all up, 'cos we're nice like that