Posted 5th Jul 2023
Hi guys, I have cancelled sky after 16 years, I hardly watch tv and the price just kept creeping up over the years. I have to send the sky box back, what are my options? Would I be better off with a free view box? I do have a smart tv. Thanks
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sorted byYou can get them fairly cheap at CeX with 2 year warranty.
If you don’t have a tv aerial then the alternative would be one of the new 4K Freesat boxes instead which does similar to the above but via a dish.
I think the freesat 4k box is supposed to work with most sky q LNBs, if you don't want to replace it.
An Enigma 2 satellite box is another option, but I don't know if any support a sky q lnb. Enigma 2's advantage is it can receive the freesat 7 day guide, but is not bound by freesat's rules, so you can stream and copy recordings and install all sorts of plugins and customisations, add an usb freeview tuner etc, but enigma is a Linux distro and much more involved to set up and much less user friendly.
EDIT: A quick google suggests you can't get an Enigma2 based box that support sky q (wideband) LNBs. Standard, Unicable and Universal LNBs yes. I have an enigma box almost identical to this - world-of-satellite.co.uk/sat…pvr (edited)
I personally only use streaming services now, I do miss the big live sports events, but rarely have time to watch them anyway.
If you do not have this available on your TV, you can buy a box. I have a Freesat box for this on an older TV, which supports full recording, rewind, even reminders which Sky got rid of with Q. The interface is ugly, but given there's no subscription to pay it's well worth it.
Now if you have Sky Q installed, as others have mentioned this would usually mean the Sky engineer has changed the LNB to a Sky Q one. What I did was pay someone to change the LNB to a hybrid one (go to the dish, remove the Sky Q one and replace it with one that will work fully). If you buy a box and can't get it to work you may have to have this done. It didn't cost too much as it's a simple job, and the savings from not paying for Sky justify it. Now there's no worry of being tied into a contract, haggling prices down for TV ever again, there's nothing to pay and you own your own equipment again
Worth noting - Freeview is for aerial and Freesat is satellite dish, I would go for Freesat using your existing dish (edited)
Had to change ours because the old one died, although we've since put up a larger dish to get a more reliable picture when it rains heavily - having an enigma 2 box helped aligning the new dish, because we could stream the signal strength and quality to a mobile phone while we tilted it.