After the Sky/Premier League ruling how you can watch football on foreign satellite channels

Potentially huge news today as the European Court of Justice has ruled in favour of a pub landlady from Portsmouth who has been showing live football from foreign channels in her establishment, rather than subscribing to Sky.

The ECJ said that national laws which prohibit the import, sale or use of foreign decoder cards are contrary to the freedom to provide services.

What this means is that pubs across the UK can bin their Sky subs and now get their Prem footage from Greek TV stations at a tenth of the cost. But it isn’t just pubs who can benefit. Football fans can also take this route and save a few quid too.

Ultimately it is very difficult to say at this point how the ruling will affect the English game. It could force Sky to lower its subscription costs and thereby pay less to the clubs. They would then have less money to pay players and it might mean that the gap between the super rich billionaire-owned clubs and everyone else starts to become huge. Anyway we’ll see.

If you are considering ditching Sky, be warned though, tuning into Greek (or any other type of foreign TV) isn’t exactly plug and play. But if you do fancy giving it a whirl here’s how you do it. It’s relatively inexpensive to set up, and offers many matches not available on Sky Sports, particularly 3pm Saturday kick-offs.

It’s a moderately complex process, but this beginners guide will point you in the right direction for viewing football via foreign sports channels, and offer some links to where to find more info should you want to delve a little deeper into international satellite TV.

What You Will Need:

A satellite dish – This is used to pick up the broadcast signal and pipe it into a set-top box. You need one at least 78cm in diameter, but a bit bigger than that, around 100cm, is probably optimal for residential use. Signals from European channels tend to be weaker than UK ones, hence the need for a larger dish.

Dishes can be manually pointed at the orbiting broadcast satellites, or you can purchase a motorised one that does the hard work for you, particularly useful if you plan on accessing channels from multiple satellite sources (more on that later). We’d recommend the
110cm Hi-Gain Satellite Dish from System Sat (£60, Amazon seller) or the 80cm Satgear Anthracite Satellite Dish (£31.95, Amazon seller).

A satellite receiver – These are designed to pick up European channels, perfect for getting Premier League matches, as well as La Liga, Serie A football and other European competitions. There are plenty of receivers to choose from, but a quick search around the web shows Technomate branded ones such as the TM-3000D (£53.75, Amazon seller) to be well recommended.

A universal LNB and cable – The LNB (Low Noise Block-downconverter) sits on an arm pointing at the dish, and is used to focus the satellite signal, converting it a lower frequency which your receiver can take via coaxial cable.

A viewing card or Cam – These are used like a Sky Viewing card, and are needed to de-scramble encrypted signals. Different cards and Cams provide access to different channels, and are also needed If you’re looking to access Pay-TV channels.Spend a bit of time researching the channels you’re after before buying a card or Cam, but one good place to pick them up is www.pulsat.com. They also provide receivers too.

How To Set It Up:

Setting up a satellite dish can be a potentially frustrating process, though the actual steps aren’t necessarily that complex to carry out. Either way, if you’re not particularly comfortable with installing equipment (or are afraid of heights if you’re planning on wall mounting your dish on an outer wall), you’re probably best off getting a professional to come around and install it. Megasat offer a UK wide installation service, but for a comprehensive list of engineers check out the Confederation of Aerial Industries trade lobby website.

Alternatively, there’s the good-old-fashioned DIY method. Thankfully you don’t necessarily have to wall mount a dish, so long as you’ve got a bit of open ground in your garden that can house it and point between East and West without being obscured by trees or towerblocks. Either way however, wall mounting is preferable, even if merely not to clutter your finely-mowed lawn.

From here you need to point the dish towards one of the satellites throwing out the appropriate footy channels. The best for receiving Premiership Football on are Hispasat, Astra 1 and Hotbird. A great list of channels and kick-off times can be found on Liveonsat.com, which also handily shows which satellites you’ll need to be pointing your dish at to view the appropriate channels. Many matches will be broadcast on free-to-air channels, though some will require a viewing card, as mentioned earlier.

If you’ve nabbed yourself a nifty motorised satellite dish, it can be programmed to automatically point at numerous orbiting satellites. It’s a process that can take some hours to fine tune, but it saves a lot of manual faffing about.

Otherwise, it’s time to grab your compass, and maybe even a satellite signal strength monitor, and get tweaking your satellite direction. A whole list of satellite positions and the channels they pick up can be grabbed from www.satellitetvlinks.net (to whom we are indebted to for help in researching this post), but the main three we mentioned earlier are positioned at:

Hotbird: 13 degrees East

Astra 1: 19.2 degrees East

Hispasat: 30 degress West

Remember, if you haven’t grabbed a motorised dish you’ll have to manually realign it every time you want to pick up channels from a different orbiting satellite. Alternatively, look into grabbing a dish with multiple LNBs built in and then align each of those individually, or buy a compatible multi-LNB arm and attach it to your dish. Most decent receivers will have a little signal strength icon that will help you fine tune the dish placement to the best possible angle.

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