In reply to A newbie all over again! by Annec
In reply to A newbie all over again! by Annec
If you buy a Sky Italia decoder and subscription (costing about €100 plus from €20/month) you'll be able to get BBC Prime, Sky News, and a great many original language American drama and comedy series (West Wing, ER, CSI, Friends etc) and National Geographic etc. You can also buy pay-per-view movies for about €5.
You could import your UK Sky digibox, but you'd have to have the dish re-aligned and your choice of channels would be very limited - BBC and Channel 4 are all but unobtainable.
Your UK TV would work fine here, as long as you used the common-or-garden 21-pin SCART cable to connect it to your digibox.
Hope this helps.
In reply to A newbie all over again! by Annec
Check with the landlord and see what he has installed, you would probably be better off buying a freeview box in Italy, as stated, you will get a few English speaking channels.
Your English Sky box MIGHT work, electronically there would be no problems, but, the dish size will probably be wrong, and, do you really want to spend your holiday trying to find hotbird???? (actually, when I was younger, thats exactly how I used to...)
In reply to A newbie all over again! by Annec
Thanks everyone this was really helpful
Jenny
Maybe,
Italian free to air stations include a number of English channels BBC World, ETV, Bloomberg and EuroNews. Italian Sky has much more on the subscription, most movies can be heard in english and theres a load of english channels, paramount etc etc depending on the subscription you take.
You might be able to take your UK sky box and use it depending on where you are in Italy and how big the dish is, I'm in Cagliari, Sardinia and have a 80cm dish and get loads of channels except for BBC, ITV and C4 and some other channels.
Some I get during the day but not at night, others I get all the time, like sky 1, paramount etc.
One thing you should remember is that sky uk (Astra 2) and sky italy (Hotbird) are on different satellites, so you would need to re-position the dish for uk sky to receive anything, and if the apartment has not had a set top box at all then the dish has probably never been positioned anyway and so you'll probably have to tune it to italian sky as well.
This is easier than you'd think (and easier than any satellite installer would tell you) and can be done with a little trial and error fairly quickly assuming you have good access to the dish.
There are a number of good tutorials on setting up a uk sky dish abroad on the net.