HD was indeed a huge selling point of Freesat, and remains so, as where else can you obtain BBC HD and ITV HD without subscription, or buying a Sky digibox away from Sky themselves. Once Freeview obtain HD, we can be fairly confident they’ll be on Freesat too, but until then, with the likes of Five HD not currently in operation, it cannot come on any earlier.

Whilst Freesat needs to be treated as a platform based on its own merits; lets not forget that the original key reason for the launch was to cover the areas of the UK that cannot obtain Freeview; for this purpose, Freesat is doing exactly what it should.

For those with a strong Freeview signal via aerial; and the expectation of HD channels, maybe Freesat isn’t for you, but then, you only have to look at the list of channels on Freeview, other than a few un-obtainable by Freesat, there is barely anything.

Don’t get me wrong, I know that there is only a small team at Freesat and they have managed some feats, such as getting Panasonic to create Freesat TVs, and Freesat being a selling point on the new Bluray recorder. But the key things that it needs to encourage more non-digital people to join it, or take customers from sky ad Virgin, are more quality channels, more HD channels, and Iplayer access. At the moment they are fallingt behind on all of these and with FreeVIEW being more well known and the lack of need for a dish I can see people going for that once it’s available. Also, Virgin have both the Iplayer and ITVplayer and are doing a lot of offers for people at the moment.

With the raft of news stories coming out recently regarding other service having Iplayer, more HD channels on other systems, and a direct competitor in the ‘free’ HD market, I really can’t see Freesat moving very quickly from the 1/2million boxes sold. I really like idea of my Freesat box and what I hoped it would be, I’m just not sure it’s living up to the dream???

In what way didn’t it work?

I tuned into channel 142 and everything worked as expected.

Looked great in HD!