Alan Sykes writes in to say that:
The BBC switch-over from our current S.E.S. Astra 1N and 2N satellite transponders to the new replacement Astra 2E “tight-beam” senders will take place at 2 a.m. tonight, into Thursday morning. This move is likely to blank-out most of Europe’s reception of BBC TV programmes, and its several radio channels.
See this web-page:-
http://skyinmadrid.com/pages/news.html
In the very near future, ITV and Ch 4 will also transfer their ‘terrestrial’ network feeds to the new so-called ‘UK-Beam’, relayed by Astra 2E, which is focussed tightly on the UK mainland to the exclusion of the European Continent. This will mean the loss to English-speaking Spanish and Portuguese viewers of the finest British TV News service, “Channel Four News”, broadcast nightly at 8 pm C.E.T.
The only remaining channels available with current dish equipment here from Thursday morning will be Sky 1, Sky News and the plethora of subscribed-to Sky channels for which ex-pats pay handfuls of loot each month to the Murdoch ‘Evil-Vision’ Empire, which for decades has been dedicated to ensuring the impoverishment and they hope death of the BBC.
The much-advertised so-called ‘saviour’ of expat viewing habits, in the form of IPTV suppliers’ promises saying all that’s needed is to purchase new equipment from them to connect to a standard internet router and thus receive programmes streamed on the Internet, is pure catch-penny fantasy.
The terms of most Internet Service Providers for their subscribers’ use in normal web-browsing, e-mail traffic, watching occasional YouTube films, etc., excludes regular and extended-period streaming of live TV programmes, since mass connections by thousands of potential viewers to an Internet server in order to watch gigabytes of TV picture data will instantly wipe out said server.
Truly, the 6th of February 2014 marks the end of an era.
BBC biased news broadcasting is a bad joke. It should be forced to sort out this bias that has gone on for years, or die. I look forward to the funeral.
Reception still fine this morning (6 Feb) up here in the north. If you’ve lost yours, there’s the solution – move to sunny Galicia.
On the other hand, maybe things are not on schedule.
Update: I may have lost all the radio stations. On the other hand, this could just be because of the storm raging at the moment. Which was supposed to arrive yesterday.
Sorry Colin, which bit of Galicia is “sunny”? 🙂
Sunny: Most of it during the wonderful summer months of temps in the 25 region. Unless you’re daft enough to buy property in Ourense, where it’s much hotter. Or La Coruña, which is in both the Atlantic and the Bay of Biscay, with predictable results. But a nice lighthouse.
Not a lot of sun in the winter, though.
Satellite update: –
Lost radio progs during a storm but all back now. In brief, seem to have retained all TV and radio progs for now.
All BBC channels on sky box gone completely in Mojacar despite using a 1.8M dish.
I suspect the internet streaming will now cause all sorts of problems, no doubt the internet service providers will not be prepared!
Just saw a picture of your house on tv, Colin, and it said the wind speed was 144 kph!
Adrian, my tame Sat boy says you can get it with a 1,8m dish but need a decent LNB. And it will probably go off in a storm.
go on computer to http://www.filmon.com and you can get all the channels and watch them through the tv via your computer. Have been watching BBC1 (including rugby 6 nations!!) and no problems x