Sky Sports News HD

As an ex-pub owner, I wonder how much your man in the street thinks pubs have to pay to broadcast Sky in their licensed areas?

Would around £700 to £800 per MONTH surprise you?

Read the comments from landlords here: www.thepublican.com/story.asp?storycode=66477

Branches of Wetherspoons - which of course don't show sport - often have TV sets on the walls showing Sky Sports News from Freeview

It'll be interesting to see how they do it, I hope they ignore all the 4:3 viewers and go for a full 16:9 on both SD and HD. The alternative is either to waste the extra 'HD real estate' by making it 4:3 safe or run two seperate graphics systems like Sky News does

Great to hear that they are finally going widescreen. And not long to go now!

I suspect the SD channel will keep 4:3 safe graphics. Sky realise that a large proportion of their audience is watching 4:3 centre cut - either on a 4:3 TV or stretched to fill a 16:9 TV (!)

Sky SD DigiBoxes come set-up for 4:3 centre-cut (or they certainly used to) as the default output setting - and many installers don't bother to configure them properly for 16:9 displays...

Our Local Wethers as nice as a pub it is, always shows Sky News, cropped, with subtitles and the sound off. I think they gave up on SSN sometime ago.

I think a lot of Pubs are giving up on Sky due to the cost and the ease of getting access to foreign satellite channels, saying that there's a pub I've been to near me where they pay and promote Sky Sports and ESPN, but they also show games from the Scandinavian Canal+ Sport channels, in English too.

I don't see how they can have 4:3 safe graphics on a channel like that unless they just don't put any graphics in the extra space at either side of the screen. What they could find that would be thin enough to take up just the pillar I can't think.

It might be a good way to persuade those with incorrectly set up TVs to set them up properly

Mine has 2 widescreen sets, both on mute. One always shows BBC News, which somehow they mess up by having it in 4:3 and chopping the top and bottom off, the other has SSN which also has the top and bottom cut off. This means that both tickers are missing which are quite useful on a mute TV set (they have the subtitles on but they are terrible both in terms of reception and quality)


Wetherspoons of course never had sport (in fact the mute news screens are a new innovation I think). Down south, middle eastern sports channels are more common, I've seen snooker with BBC graphics being shown in a pub but with an ART logo bug. I believe that legally watching sport from channels outside Europe is more legit than from somewhere like Scandinavia.

Some JDW now have Sky Sports provision. And even those which don't often put FTA sport on.

I wonder if it would be technically and legally possible for a large pub chain to pay a central Sky subscription or two and distribute the relevant channels to each of their branches over the Internet, their own private network or even over an encrypted satellite feed. With the charges Sky make, there has got to be a point when it is cheaper to distribute the pictures yourself.

That would then price the smaller pubs completely out of the market. Besides, I imagine large pub chains have a Sky fund to distribute to their branches. Also, as Sky Pub subscriptions are based on the Rateable Value of the property, the subscription cost for each branch would be different for each one.

I'm surprised at their marketing strategy....a bit negative to say on the top line of the Sky Sports article 'we're leaving Freeview'.

I am sure most people in marketing would emphasize the positive new offerings, not start by attracting attention to the negative 'we're not on Freeview any more'.