New TV has iPlayer but it goes through the Freesat HD tuner that is built in.
Instead of running another cable to the dish I was going to fit a signal splitter to one of the cables that feeds the Sky box.
Will the sky box still work on both tuners if the TV is also using one of the feeds?

no

edit – longer answer. For the two feeds to tune into different channels you need to take several feeds from the dish

HoratioHufnagel is right – the satellite receiver sends commands to the LNB on the dish (the block thing that stick out the front) telling it what frequency to decode. You can (without a LOT of effort) control multiple LNB receivers with one cable.

Rachel

Hang on hang on, are we at angry dolphins here?

iPlayer via Freesat takes its data from a broadband connection still, does it not? Ie, you don’t need a satellite feed to the TV at all, you need an Ethernet connection to your router.

I think, anyway.

im fairly sure your overcomplicating things

sky signals wont be decoded by your freeview anyway – what you want for your freeview in the TV is a traditional aerial.

how ever Iplayer is an internet based service so as per cougar youll be wanting an ethernet unless your TV is wireless enabled ?

what you want for your freeview in the TV is a traditional aerial.

OP said Freesat, not Freeview. (I misread that at first too and had to retype most of my post).

what you want for your freeview in the TV is a traditional aerial.

But the OP said his TV had freeSAT which needs a dish.

IIRC

Freesat and sky are on different frequencies, so although you can use the same dish, it needs a new reciever bit on the dish. And you can’t recieve 2 channels at the same time through one reciever so things like sky+ or multiple rooms would need 2 recievers on the same dish.

iplayer comes through the broadband, not the satelite

Freesat and freeview are on different frequencies

I think you are confusing things – Freeview is terrestial, Freesat is satellite and is the BBC/ITV venture. Sky tried to muddy the waters by also providing something called freesat.

OK, I’ll clear up a couple of things as my original post might not have been clear enough.
The TV has both Freeview HD and Freesat HD tuners built in although we usually use Sky [but I’d like to change this].
Even though the TV has internet services, iPlayer can only be accessed through the red button on Freesat (which I haven’t connected yet but would like to) – I don’t know whether the programs are transmitted via satellite or via the broadband connection. Bit weird but there you go.

A quick look at the freesat web page and it seems that the data is sent through the broadband – so it looks like I only need a satellite connection to either startup freesat on the TV.
I’ll plug it in and see what happens!

Freesat and sky are in the same frequency range. They are different satellites (in the same sector of the sky) so pointing the dish at one will pick up the other as well. Sky is scrambled (mainly but not all chanels) so needs decoding, freesat isn’t.

The receivers send power to the LNB so if you split between two receivers, you need to make sure that only one is sending power (even in standby).

You can only realistically use one receiver at a time, but you can split the cable to save swapping it between the two receivers.

The LNB doesn’t do any decoding, but the signals are transmitted on two polarities and it needs to switch between them according to the channel, so you could watch two channels at the same time as long as they are on the same polarity.

Thats as I remember it works anyhow.

I used to have FreeSAT (got rid of the TV now – best thing I’ve done all year!) and iPlayer came into the box via an Ethernet connection to my broadband.

The picture quality was average at best. TBH, I get much better using my iPad and the iPlayer app on that now…

Oh – and FreeSAT and Sky use exactly the same free-to-air transmissions of channels. So, if you are watching BBC ONE on FreeSAT it is the same frequency as BBC ONE on Sky. Sky provide the programme guide through their own systems, whereas the FreeSAT one is provided elsewhere.

Rachel

You cannot split a satellite feed due to the reasons noted by Allthegear, however, you can run both a Sky and a FreeSat decoders off the same dish if you purchase some additional equipment, namely a quad LNB and a MultiSwitch device.
Both are reasonably easy and cheap to install but please note that you will need to run 4 cables from the satellite dish instead of the existing one.

You replace the existing LNB installed on the dish with the Quad LNB, you then run 4 x Coaxial cables from this to the Multiswitch device. This is effectively a splitter which then allows you to connect as many decoders (Sky or FreeSat) to it as supported by the Multiswitch device you have bought (they come in many flavors) using a single coaxial cable for each decoder.
Please note that this will only work when looking at Astra satellite feeds used by FreeSat and Sky, for more exotic satellite feeds you will need additional dishes.

If you want I can provide the details of a couple of good Sat engineers based in the UK who I have worked with in the past who should be able to assist, just message me via my profile.

my bad

rachel i wish i could get rid of the telly…..

i rarely watch it – at best i use it as a big screen for eurosport player off my ipad.

how ever other folk in my house religeously come in the house and turn on the TV to anything for “background noise”.

I just turn it off again as soon as they leave the room. – surely thats why radio exists !

You cannot split a satellite feed due to the reasons noted by Allthegear

Apart from the fact that you can, and I have.

You replace the existing LNB installed on the dish with the Quad LNB

If you’ve had Sky+ installed in the last (handwave) five years, you’ve almost certainly got a quad LNB fitted already.

i sell all this stuff.
the cheapest and only guarenteed way to do what you want is to run another feed to the lnb.

“background noise”…surely thats why radio exists !

No. Radio (at least, the BBC) is for listening to very carefully.

Did you catch the Reith Lecture broadcast this morning?

(As it is, the simpler answer is to ditch worrying about Sky vs FreeSat, and just get YouView when it’s launched later this year.)

Right, well I did buy a splitter last night (£1.95 delivered!) but I couldn’t wait so I pulled one of the feeds out of the Sky box and put it into the TV.
TV set up the freesat, I pressed the red button and up came iPlayer. Selected something to play in ‘high quality’ and off it went. I only watched for a few mins but there was no buffering and the quality was probably the same as I get when streaming from the iPad to the AppleTV – so not HD but not bad. I suspect that they’re not going to stream data fast enough for HD quality on a 46″ plasma!!
When I unplugged the sat cable from the TV and tried to access iPlayer again it simply stated that there was no signal. So it uses the satellite to initiate the player and get the program data but the actual program is streamed via broadband.
As I’ll probably only use freesat for the iPlayer capability (I find freeview HD to be slightly better quality) I think a cheapo splitter will do the job and I don’t have to run another cable – which is good ‘cos although we’ve got a quad LNB two of the feeds go into another room.

Oh – and FreeSAT and Sky use exactly the same free-to-air transmissions of channels.

You mean “Freesat from Sky”, which is not FreeSat.

(I find freeview HD to be slightly better quality

This is where the Freesat project is a massive fail – the satellite feed should be much better as there is more bandwidth to play with, but the idiots at the BBC have decided to nobble it so it looks roughly the same as Freeview.

Another screw up from the BBC to follow on from DAB…