Unless there’s some kind of breakthrough in negotiations in the next few hours I’ll be losing four BSkyB channels from my cable TV feed at midnight tonight.
The four channels in question are Sky One, Sky Two, Sky News and Sky Sports News. I only ever watch Sky One (and the occasional repeat on Sky Two) and the only programme I’m regularly watching on Sky One currently is Lost. Sky One is only any good for US imports and most of the good ones are now on E4 or More 4.
Currently Sky One broadcasts Lost the day after it is shown in the US. Which means there will be lots of well-seeded Bittorrent trackers. So I can’t really see it effecting me at all.
The lowest point of the argument has been the adverts aimed at Virgin that Sky have run during popular programmes. These have put across Sky’s view of the dispute (“Sky want to continue to give you top quality programming but those nasty people at Virgin Media are going to cut you off”) and strongly suggested that Virgin customers phone Virgin asking them to cave in and pay Sky’s increased fees.
Maybe I’m biased, but it seems to me that Sky have been acting like bullies here and I’m glad to see Virgin stand up to them.
Update: Well they’re gone this morning. Sky One has been replaced with Virgin Central 2 (which is identical to Virgin Central – and a bit of a waste of a channel if you ask me). Sky Two has been replaced with a message from Virgin saying “blame Sky, not us”. And BBC News 24 has been moved to the old Sky News spot.
You’ll find quite a lot of SKY output at http://www.alluc.org/alluc/
I have Sky as my provider, so I am not losing it. However any NTL customers that I know are going to use RTE to see Lost – it is shown on a Monday at 10pm. However I am not sure if NTL carries RTE in England/Wales/Scotland – it probably only does it for NI customers.Anyway, Lost has turned into a big steaming pile of poo lately, and if it wasn’t for sky+ and the series linker function I doubt I would see it.