Best non Sky satellite box?

[Goosh]

Hi, I have a Sky dish but I can't afford Sky and I was wondering if I can get English language movies and UK football using any other box?

If this is possible could you point me in the right direction so I can find out the cheapest way or the best way to do this?

Thanks for your advice

 

[witchy]

You'll also need to adjust the dish and point it at a different satellite, all the football on the 'Sky' satellite is owned by BSkyB and only available via a subscription. There are loads of other services showing UK football and English language movies and tv shows which you can recieve for much less than a Sky sub.

Personally I use a Dreambox 500 connected to a 1.2 meter motorised dish and a cardshare server, which gets me all the BSkyB stuff and most of the other European providers.

 

[Goosh]

Hi, thanks for replying, I can move the dish no problem but do I need to have a larger dish to get football and movies? I think 90cm is probably the largest I could go.

I see that Dreamboxes are about £90 and I can afford that but what is a cardshare server?

 

[witchy]

The dreambox has a LAN port which allows it to connect to the Internet, some people run Servers which allow you to share their subscription over the Internet, for instance, you could connect to someone elses server which runs a Sky card, this would give you access to the same channels as the subscriber, now the person who runs the server will most likely be connected to other servers which allow him to share their cards, the other people could be sharing Sky Italia, Premiere, Viasat etc cards, this would allow you to recieve all these packages for free aswell.

 

[Goosh]

Wow that sounds pretty amazing. Does that mean in theory you could get 1000s of channels? Do you need a stable internet speed to take part in that? Do you need to share something as well?

 

[witchy]

You will get literally 1000's of channels mate - just a shame that 95% of them are garbage tho

Any Broadband connection is more than enough as it's only a few bytes that's being transmitted, it's only a tiny amount of data that your box will recieve but it does need to be stable.

You don't necessarily need to share anything back but if you do you'll find it easier to get yourself onto a free server, if you don't have anything to share then you can still join a server but they generally charge you a fee, but don't worry the fee is nothing compared to a Sky subscription.

There are good servers and there are bad servers, bad servers are ran by greedy bastards who vastly over subscribe their servers to breaking point, good servers tend to far more private and maybe only a handful of people each sharing a different type of card, each card owner may have a further 10 people without any card to share but paying a small subscription fee, these types of server are IMO much more stable

I'm not a fan of Pay servers.

 

[Goosh]

Hi thanks a lot for the info. I don't want you to tell me everything lol but could I get a decent set up with a Dreambox 500s (with ethernet) and a 90cm dish or even a Sky dish?

Thanks again for your advice