Too many channels

WHAT'S THE STORY WITH THE CHOICE OF TV SUBSCRIPTIONS?:WATCHING TELEVISION in Ireland used to be a comparatively simple business. In the 1980s the TV viewing population was divided between those who had "the channels" – mostly those living on the east coast and near the Border – and those who had RTÉ 1 and 2 (the rest of the country), writes CONOR POPE.

Today the number of channels available through cable, MMDS and satellite services is mind boggling, and the range of packages offered by the companies who supply them can be overwhelming. Do you go with satellite or cable? High definition? Will a set-top recorder make your life better? (Short answer: absolutely.) What about multi-room viewers? And are we as digital-ready as our TVs claim to be?

And the choices don’t end there; consumers also have the option of free satellite services which involve a fairly hefty upfront charge but no bills, and then there are the boxes that dare not speak their name – set-top decoders which sell online for not much more than €100 and give viewers access to dozens of pay-per-view channels at no cost. The only downside is that accessing such channels is illegal.

One reader contacted Pricewatch recently after growing bewildered by what was on offer. “I’ve looked at their bumph and websites and have been thoroughly confused about how they compare,” she wrote. It’s not hard to see why. Take Sky Television, now the biggest supplier of pay-TV in the State; it stopped publishing its numbers for the Republic last year but it is estimated that it has close to 600,000 customers now, over 50,000 more than its biggest rival UPC.

It’s fighting hard to win more. At the end of last month, Sky cut the price of its high-definition (HD) digital recorder set-top box – which offers substantially improved picture quality – from €149 to €49 in an effort to boost HD subscriber numbers, currently less than 10 per cent of its business in Ireland.

Installation of this service is now free for new customers and €50 for existing customers, although the charge to existing customers is waived if they opt for a multi-room package – not really multi-room at all, more like one other room – which costs €7.37 a month per additional box; that’s a discount for new customers – its full price is twice that amount.

THE COST OF non-HD Sky+ is €24.50 to which an installation charge of €50 for new customers has to be added, although that’s waived if it is taken out alongside multi-room. Regular Sky+, meanwhile, costs €100 for existing Sky customers, or €50 if they take out Sky’s multi-room. And on and on it goes. We haven’t even decided what Sky package we want yet – they range in price from €20.50 to €69.50 a month so choosing the wrong deal could end up costing over €600 a year.

UPC’s pricing structures are even more headache-inducing because it doesn’t have the HD option but does still offer an analogue service as well as a range of keenly priced broadband deals.

Its cheapest analogue deals are €24.50 per month while the cheapest digital equivalents are €20. It charges €8.50 extra per month per room for its multi-room service – substantially less than the full price charged by Sky – and its digital service offers a facility similar to Sky+ that allows you to pause, rewind and record live TV.

There is, of course the option of turning your back on the big providers and getting your TV signals without paying a monthly subscription at all. Freeview satellite services are legally available throughout the country at a fraction of the cost charged by Sky and UPC. A satellite dish giving you access to more than 200 channels – many of which are actually worth watching – can be bought in Maplin for around €120. Tesco also sells satellite kits and they are to be found on occasion in Lidl for even less than €120. You simply attach the dish to your house, feed the cable from the dish into your house and connect it to your TV and bingo – lifetime access to more than 200 channels for less than a third of the cost of a high-end Sky subscription for one year.

If that sounds too much like hard work – and it probably does – there is an easier way to get low-cost satellite television. There are dozens of satellite companies who will do it for you. Companies such as satellite.ie offer installations for a one-off fee of €289 and they charge less than €100 if you already have a working Sky dish in place.

The service gives access to over 130 stations, including all the BBC channels, ITV, Film Four, a range of children’s channels, multiple news channels (including Sky News and CNN) and a host of other channels, many of which are probably of marginal interest, unless your German is particularly fluent.

The Irish channels are unavailable via free-to-air satellite because of problems as they are contracted to Sky TV, although they can be accessed for free via a normal TV aerial.

If you go down this route, there is no customer support and no guarantee of service, so if the BBC or ITV decide to pull their free-to-air satellite service, those with dishes might be left with no option but to go back to the traditional providers.

There is another route people are taking to access premium channels, albeit an illegal one. Small set-top decoders which sell online for not much more than €100 and give viewers access to dozens of pay-per-view channels at no cost are flying off virtual shelves. There are now an estimated 100,000 in circulation in the Republic, which has given the main TV providers endless heartache.

THE BOXES DECODE digital television signals which are transmitted in parallel with the analogue signals; once the box is switched on it can search for and unscramble the digital signals. Customers sign up to basic packages with UPC, for instance, at a cost of €24 a month and then access the premium movie and sports packages with codes and software downloaded from the web. It is the viewers themselves who put the software on the boxes; all the companies who sell the boxes have disclaimers warning people against doing anything which might be in breach of the Copyright Act: “It is the customer’s responsibility to ensure that this box is used in a legal and correct manner. Connecting this box to a live network does contravene their terms and conditions,” warns one company.

A UPC spokeswoman told Pricewatch it was an industry-wide concern and said there was legislation in place to protect legitimate businesses against those engaged in selling the illegal devices. “It is quite a sinister operation if you get into the detail,” she said. She was reluctant to even give the boxes the oxygen of publicity. “We do go after individual users – we just don’t talk about it in the public domain,” she said, adding that to “foil any operation there is always background surveillance going on”.

There are, she says, “ways and means of monitoring such activities”.

She says the various platforms work closely at combating the problem. “Anyone who is actively engaged in this knows exactly what they are getting into and anyone who subscribes to a service like this is actively supporting an underworld activity.”

She says the boxes “have absolutely no use in Ireland” other than to subvert the law and says that it has forced auction sites to delist them.