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Had enough of the exorbitant charges from sky so looking at alternatives. We have Netflix and Amazon already but will miss the additional movies sky also has (we like films).
The big thing we like about our sky package is really just the box cos we pause and rewind live TV as well as series link stuff all the time.
So what would you recommend? Freeview, Freesat, now TV??
Pretty much any PVR box will do what you want, ideally one that's DTG approved (DTG are the industry standards group and compliance with those standards *should* ensure that the STB will work as intended and handle what is being broadcast - for example "series link" is one of the things that has to be supported as are the "trick modes" like pause and rewind).
Since you've already got a satellite dish FreeSat will just fit in without any extra hassle other than the installation routine. You could still use the Sky box but with a Freesat card rather than a Sky one. Not sure if they still let you keep the box when you cancel your contract, might depend on how new the box is.
Freeview requires a terrestrial aerial so if you don't have one of those then factor in installing that.
Not used Now TV so ...
Doesn't the TV have Freeview built in?
Some TVs will let you record if you plug in a USB hard drive.
Yes, we have freeview on the TV. Its the pause, record / link functions that i want to make sure we retain. Never heard 0f using a hard drive to do that.
The pause/rewind functionality is doable because the box writes the incoming channel onto the hard drive then immediately reads it back to send out to the TV. The channel is effectively recorded on the hard drive. So when you press pause, the box keeps decoding the channel and writing it onto the hard drive, when you press play it starts reading from where it was before. Press fast forward and you move through the buffer until you get back to "now". Rewind just goes back through the buffer until you press play or pause. Usually the "live" buffer is about an hour's worth of video but some boxes will have more, some less. You could use an SSD but the (relatively) limited read-write cycles would mean that the device wouldn't last long - the way STBs use hard drives is really really hard on them.
Series link doesn't require a HD unless you want to record some/all of the episodes. It's a feature of the data behind the scenes that digital TV uses to organise everything. A simple way of looking at it is that it's a bit like our names. Each episode has a given name and a family name, the family name is basically the series so when you select "Walton" you are offered all episodes but if you selected "John" you'd just get that episode. The system uses event IDs and series IDs which are just unique numbers.