I don't watch much TV so have never bothered with Sky. I used to have the Saturn cable TV in the Kapiti area, but the channels I watched regularly boiled down to BBC World....and BBC World.....or maybe BBC World.
In Auckland, we've made do with a pair of bunny ears and the basic free to air channels. Three of them were fairly clear and the rest enjoyed some degree of disturbance, disruption and static.
Today we went out and bought a terrestrial FreeviewHD box from DSE.
Now every channel is crystal clear and we also have the extras like TVNZ6, 7 and Sports Extra. We can't see Triangle, Juice and Prine through Freeview, but all we have to do get those is turn the Freeview box off and watch via the Philips DVD-RW that sits between FreeviewHD and the TV.
The FreeviewHD has some cool features common with set-top boxes. We can check out the programme schedules a week in advance while watching the current channel in an embedded window.
There is a lot more to it, but the summary is: If you don't have a Freeview box and you can't be bothered paying $50 / month for Sky, then get one.
Now I'll be able to watch Russell Brown's Media 7 show the way it was intended.
