Television in London

If you come to London and find you need a fix of watching a screen without being interactive with it what are your options? Well things are a lot better than 20 years ago when you had a choice of four whole channels to choose from, nowadays like elsewhere having a satellite dish at home means you can get pretty much anything from anywhere.

If you’re staying here for an extended stay, maybe renting a place for a short time, signing up for a 12 month bells and whistles satellite subscription is possibly not what you want to do.
There are two other options, but first if you have a tv in the UK you also have to have a licence for it. The money raised from this goes to pay for the BBC with its tv, radio and internet operations. As the BBC try’s to keep up with the ever changing media world, principly by expanding more and more, it needs a lot more revenue and its only source is the licence fee.

Currently the cost of a licence for a colour tv is £131.50 per year, for a black and white set if they still exist its £44.

Armed with your new licence and set you can receive five channels free to air, BBC1, BBC2, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel Five.
BBC1 is the BBC’s flagship channel where they put their main network news programmes, big budget dramas, soap operas and ratings winning reality shows. Its a channel I hardly ever watch.
BBC2 has a mixed bag of wildlife, sport, some good documentaries and its where the BBC try’s out new comedy. Worth a look now and again.
ITV was Britain’s first commercial channel and its just full of soaps and reality rubbish every day of the week
Channel 4 used to get all the hot new American shows but had a habit of burying them late at night, occasionally has some good shows. Insanely pc and leftwing nightly news.
Channel Five the newest of the free to air channels, lots of the top US series and movies plus some sport.

To bump up your choice of channels without paying a subscription you can buy a Freeview box. You can get these for around £20 and they decode a bunch of channels that are free if you have the digital decoder. They work best if you have a roof top aerial, plug the aerial into the Freeview box and the box into the tv and you should pick up about 30 more channels with nothing else to pay.
You won’t get the sports channels but entertainment, kids, news and music ones.

If you do decide you can’t live without a hundred channels, satellite dish’s are the commonest way to receive them in the UK, cable is available in limited areas. Most of the providers are now trying to bundle tv, phone, broadband and even mobile phone packagaes together.