Help! I don't ever want to contact sky again - ever!!

[sabine]

Can someone tell me how I can access high quality History / Documentary / Discovery channels. I don't mind paying for a subscription but I don't want to be robbed for a lot of bad channels and no notice.

I subscribe to 'Love Films" for movies is there something similar for History or??

Huge thanks!!

[BGonaSTICK]

Hiya.

Well, as far as alternatives to Sky, there's ESPN, but that's only really sports, Top-Up TV, which is only really dross, and BT Vision, which is mainly dross, but does have the 'TV' package, which includes some documentary and educational material (but not as much as it might). It's also to difficult to find out exactly what you're going to get for your money prior to signing up with BT, which doesn't inspire confidence!

I believe that the family of Discovery channels is still available via a direct subscription (i.e. IP streaming) so if you have a box that can get web-stuff onto your TV screen, it might be a more reasonable option. You pay for what you watch, and I've used it - it's quite good.

On the illegal front, DigiTV is still open on modified set-top boxes and various other naughty platforms and that's great - all the channels you could wish for - but that will be coming to an end soon. Still might be worth trying out as you can buy a patched box for £25. You'll also need a 70 - 80cm dish pointed at 1W though.

Foreign subscription cards are available with tons of goodies (lots in English), but they're not cheap to buy, although many of them can be 'shared' with other people, so buying one card can get you watching many packages if you join a good group of like-minded individuals.

Hope that gives you a flavour.