More News Items...
The weather´s great but can I watch Corrie?
Further to our last bulletin on UK TV in Spain, the answer is..Yes you can watch Corrie and all free-to-view channels but you won´t get any Sky Channels or indeed any of the pay channels unless you have room for a 6ft dish on your roof and a few grand to spare for the proper legal dish and receiver box….
Things have settled down here, most people have switched to Torresat, Simulsat or have clubbed together to get a communal dish (more about those later). Still can´t get sports at home but soap fans are happy. Those bars who haven´t got the horrendously expensive Sky system are managing to get most sporting events using a combination of Torresat, ShowSports and Spanish TV. Occasionally the commentary comes in Spanish or Arabic (?!) but hooray, we get to see all the goals, tries, record-breaking runs and 12 foot putts so alls well with the world!
The latest rumour has it that Sky and other exponents of pay-to-view, including the BBC, have been found by the European courts to be acting illegally by withholding rights to view throughout Europe and they will be obliged to un-protect their frequencies in the near future. Maybe the wailers were right then?! Time will tell….
For now I´ll finish with a word of caution to those thinking of getting a communal aerial. We were lulled into the “one-off payment” idea, with the promise of 200 channels and the dish being installed in the communal grounds. Two months down the line and we have only about 10 channels we can watch properly, over half don´t work at all and the rest are pop music, shopping or Muslim channels. We get BBC1, ITV1 and some other ITV stuff, all repeats…apparently, being the furthest house from the dish means the cable is too long, weakening the signal..am not convinced. On hindsight we should have withheld payment until we got a satisfactory system, now we have a fight on our hands to get our money back. Can´t see that happening can you?
Paying monthly has its advantages, if you don´t get the service you just cancel the direct debit and go elsewhere…Job done! Meanwhile I guess its down to the beach for some hookey DVDs to tide us through the winter… Pass the remote!
The weather´s great but can I watch Corrie?
Receiving English TV channels in Spain used to be a simple affair..you got a small dish and a receiver box installed for around 400€, coughed up 20€ a month to the supplier and got 30 odd channels including all the terrestial channels plus Sky Sports, Sky Movies, UK Gold, History channel etc etc. Happy days!!
The problem was it was all illegal so when Telmicro, the biggest supplier in the area, was shut down in August 2008 by the Guardia and the directors thrown in jail, it goes without saying there was pandemonium amongst the British expats living here. Not being big telly-watchers and what with it being summer and all, we took the high ground and looked on with smug amusement as the cafes, bars and urbanisations buzzed with rumour, rage and conjecture. “We are EU citizens, we have a right to watch English telly!” they wailed…..er..no, you are in Spain dear!!
We weren´t unaffected however, as for some reason beyond me, British holiday-makers need to watch telly on holiday, meaning several of our rental properties were now deficient of an essential item with which to attract the tourists…So we set about finding alternative suppliers, the next biggest company was Torresat, who cleaned up their act, deleted all their illegal channels and replaced them with about 80 new ones, needless to say they had a field day over the next few months. They still had their problems however, as they had insufficient antennas in place so if you weren´t in line-of-sight of one you couldn´t get a signal….Plus they were no longer broadcasting Sky or any of the associated channels. This was a big problem for the local bars who relied on big sports events to fill seats. Most have now bought new systems but it must have made a huge hole in their profits.
On the domestic front new companies have sprung up everywhere offering packages of all sorts from big community installations to 1m dishes from Portugal of all places! Still we weren´t tempted although winter was coming on and inevitably we would start to miss cosy evenings in with David Attenborough, Jeremy Clarkson et al. We were rewarded for our patience when Simulsat bought out the remains of Telmicro at the end of 2008, all we needed was a new box and were were up and running again, albeit with restricted channels. So now we have English TV and sometimes we can get sports on the Spanish channels. If we can´t then we have to go watch it in a bar…Shame…Cheers!!
