Ratings of channels on SKY

Hallo there
Curious as to what the ratings are for some of the lesser-known channels on SKY. Thousands? Hundreds? Tens? I can't imagine Horse & Country raking in the millions!

Connor.

There's too many rubbish channels on Sky Digital, they need to take a leaf out out of Sky Italia's book and only have decent channels on the platform.

Out of interest, why do virgin not appear to have the "if they pay you, they must go on the epg" requirement that sky have? there's certainly far less utter shlte on virgin than there is on sky.

Virgin don't have the bandwidth I would presume

there is a lot of bandwidth on Sky, however its absolutely wasted, hence ITV looks awful and even the BBC when tuned through a non Sky box have duplicate channels when they could have used the space to provide full screen news interactive service.

You don't understand the issue do you? The BBC must pay for their own bandwidth on Sky. If they want more, they have to pay more.

There is a huge difference between Sky and Virgin Media when it comes to minor channels.

Virgin are responsible for providing every single channel in their EPG - they rebroadcast every channel you get on a digital cable system. They are regulated - but they totally control the cable that connects you to their head-end.

Satellite is very different. Sky don't own the Astra or Eurobird satellites, they just lease some of the transponder capacity on them. BBC, ITV, C4, Viacom and Flextech (may also now be called Virgin Media confusingly) also lease transponders independently of Sky and uplink (or subcontract uplink) themselves. Sky just manage the EPG - which by law they have to do fairly - otherwise they would be in a monopoly position - as they both operate the EPG and provide some of the channels.

I'm sure Sky wouldn't particularly chose many of the channels on the satellite platform - but they can't stop them from hiring 3rd party transponder space, and legally they can't refuse them EPG slots whilst other channels are still being added.

That's not what I am saying I am saying there are channels which you cant see on a Sky box that are duplicates, eg on satellite, the BBC have a channel called 6945 which is a duplicate of BBC HD, so there are 2 copies of the same channel, and there are few others like that, what I am saying is they can make better use of the existing space by getting rid of duplicates, since when did I say the BBC should get more!!

and with a sky receiver, you can't delete channels like the good old days, hence there is a perception where Sky Digital has a lot of useless channels even though its not Sky's fault.

And just to confuse matters more, there will be a second EPG launched tomorrow (apparently) for Freesat. This will give you three options:

Buy a Sky receiver (with or without a subscription and card) for the Sky EPG, interactive services and encrypted channels.

Buy a Freesat receiver which will have a different EPG and interactive capabilities if you have no interest in the encrypted channels.

Or you could get a generic FTA satellite reciever, tune the thing in yourself and just get the non encrypted channels and not bother with any interactive services.

Whichever of the three systems you have, when you select BBC1 London they will all tune in to exactly the same signal - but the last two options will have no involvement with Sky in doing so.

I would presume the duplicates have some kind of technical purpose, rather than just being there for fun. ISTR they're something to do with interactive services.

Are you sure '6945' is a duplicate? If this is in that section of chanels which you have manually added then chances are that it's BBC HD under an old name