Freesat is nearly here

So the TV aerial on my new house is rubbish. Watching Eastenders which freezes every 3 seconds is more annoying than watching the real thing. I invited a company to come round and take a look. Even thought I'd told them the aerial was on the 4th floor, they still turned up, told me it was 'too high' and that I now needed to pay them a £30 callout charge. If I really wanted them to fix it, it'll be £280 - and that I might consider Freesat from Sky. On commission I wonder?

I'd already beaten them to it on this one. Freesat from Sky just needs a sky box, dish, and a £20 card you can order from Sky, and that's it. I didn't have a sky dish, so I brought one off Ebay and fitted it myself. Seriously, it was easy. Thing is, Freesat from Sky is rubbish.

You only get a small subset of the freeview channels (no Dave, E4 or More4) plus lots of rubbish, and worst of all, you can't customise the EPG to only show the 10 channels you can get worth watching.

Help is nearly at hand. Aware that Freesat from Sky is rubbish, some broadcasters including the BBC and ITV have got together in a freeview-style consortium to develop their own free satellite platform called, you guessed it, Freesat.

Now Freesat looks really promising. Firstly, as their not ties to now-ancient BSkyB hardware, they can inist every box is up to date. The big news is that ALL boxes will be HD-compatible - so its going to be the quickest and cheapest way to get BBC, ITV and eventually C4 HD services. No Subscription. Very quickly, there will be boxes with Broadband connectivity, Hard Drives and more - and when you have the bandwidth of a satellite feed, storage of a hard drive, and back-channel of the Internet, you have the single best home entertainment platform on the market - its going to rock.

We've already been doing a lot of work at the BBC about what we can do on this platform, and we're really excited about it.

Now we have to sit tight until the Spring when it launches. I for one will be getting a Freesat box to replace my crappy Sky box - even though it'll have to sit next to my Virgin V+ box. For now that is.....