The Sky's a limit

The football season (that’s “soccer” to American readers for reasons I’ve never really fathomed) has ended once again, leaving a couple of lean months as we wait for August to come around again. Not perhaps for the reasons you might imagine. In, what is I’m assured at length by football fans, a bizarre role reversal my girlfriend is a season ticket holder at Stamford Bridge, whereas I’m not that bothered by or watch sport as a general rule. What the summer does mean however, is that I don’t get every other Saturday afternoon off to play video games.

Anyway, as our overpaid Premiership stars migrate south for the summer, we’re making our preparations for the new season. What that means from my perspective is making sure that we can watch the away games in HD…Which of course would entail other channels in high definition as part of the package (so altruistic…). We bought a 1080p flat screen last Christmas but so far have had to make do without HD content other than Blu-ray. Can’t really complain too much of course, but it’s all very well being HD-ready, however we got a better SD picture on our old CRT.

Of course the options for getting HD football in the UK are somewhat limited due to the hold Murdoch’s Sky has over the Premiership. The Irish pay TV company Setanta broke Sky’s monopoly of the Premier League but has been unable to turn a profit since it won the rights to broadcast 42 games per season in 2007. If it is unable to stump up £30 million to the Premier League by the end of the week it’s going to be shown the red card.

All in all it seems the chances of Setanta rolling out an HD channel next season are slim to say the least and it seems even more unlikely that the Freesat broadcasters, BBC and ITV will be picking up the reigns… This is something of a moot point anyway since we live in one of the leafier suburbs of South West London, our street is a conservation area and we live in a small rented flat so the chances of being able to install an unsightly satellite dish are pretty minimal.

So what are the other options? Sky is planning to stream its services over Xbox Live on a pay per view basis later in the year, good news but it’s not going to be in HD. You pay a premium for Sky Sports through other cable and IPTV providers, such as Virgin’s V+ box and BT Vision. Until we find out whether there will be any pay per view HD services on the next gen Freeview services or Project Canvas further down the line. For the time being I suppose it’s back down the pub next season and no, I’m not allowed to take my DS, apparently it’s distracting… . At least this story has a (semi) happy ending