Sky Sports News HD

ESPN will continue via CAMS on IDTVs, once Sky Sports is added a box will be required as the card will then need to be placed in an approved box and paired, once paired it will not be possible to use it even for ESPN in an IDTV CAM equipped receiver.

Apparantly BSB have insisted on this.

That is true, in my old gym (which also housed a hotel and a couple of pubs) always showed a Sky Sports channel on one of the screens and when they had to change it, the Sky Sports channels were lower down the Sky EPG, not on 401-404.

As a Virgin subscriber forgive me as I have no idea what the EPG numbers are on Sky.

I've pre-ordered the Sky Sports HD channels on VM, the normal SD 1-4 were added today and the HD ones get added at 6.00am tomorrow, so I'm looking forward to the Premier League in HD.

Yes, the 'pub' versions of Sky Sports are different channels to the ones for privates homes. If you look at http://www.lyngsat.com/packages/skyuk.html you'll notice that there are 'Sky Sports 1 in Pubs', 'Sky Sports 2 in Pubs' etc. In fact there are now 4 versions of the sports channels - UK, pubs, HD and Ireland (on Astra at least, I suspect they will also produce a separate version for cable) . ESPN also has a separate version for pubs

The pub versions don't have the red dot, have the beer glass bug and different promos/adverts. The last time I played around with a box with a 'commercial' subscription, which was about 5 years ago the pub version was in 4:3 too, although this has changed now.

'Commercial' cards have the regular Sky Sports channels on channel numbers further up the EPG but obviously they shouldn't use them for viewing in the pub itself. They also get a channel called The Pub Channel http://www.pubchannel.com/ (although not much on there yet)

My mistake - I thought the video and audio was the same and it was just the service stuff/ EPG numbering/OpenTV stuff that was different. It appears that the content of the channel is different as well.

Yeah, Soccer Saturday's not on Sky Sports 1 this season, or at least not this weekend. I personally never understood why it continued to to be duplicated on both Sky Sports 1 and Sky Sports News. It used to be the case (since the end of Sky analogue and the removal of Sky Sports from analgoue cable) that if you had one you had the other. Obviously this isn't the case for BT Vision/TUTV subscribers though.

The big innovation programming wise would appear to be Sports Sunday, which looks like it will be the old summer Sports Saturday programme, but on a Sunday. Ed Chambelain is hosting this and with more and more Premier League matches being played on Sundays (as many as four per week last season) it is about time they formalised this - they were sometimes wheeling Chambelain out for Soccer Special for less.

In terms of content, Sky Sports News always suffered from the problem that it was less a sports news channel and more a rolling promotion for what was on the four premium Sky Sports channels. The biggest challenge for this relaunch will be to shed that image and start covering a wider range of sports. The "Sky Soccer News" tag thrown at the channel was not unfairly done so in my opinion, while the Olympic Games were on Sky Sports News basically ignored them in favour of football transfer news. Now they did have the **massive** obstacle of not being a rights holder and thus not being able to show any footage, but that doesn't stop them doing six hours of Soccer Saturday every Saturday without being able to show a single second of live football. Its just an example. They also suffer from very English-centric, granted, they are based in England, but apart from the SPL sporting events outside England or not involving England get little coverage. For example the Magners' League is completely ignored by SSN.

Finally, on the pubs issue, I was amazed when in Manchester in Februrary, I learnt that JD Weatherspoon's did not have a Sky Sports subscription - in Ireland it is a must have for practically every pub, either direct from Sky or via UPC.

As I mentioned earlier, some JDW's do have Sky Sports provision - mostly their Lloyds 1 Bars (which are basically JDWs anyway, same menu, same drinks, same staff).

And thankyou to everyone for answering my questions on the DTT Sky Sports issue, I can now convince my local's landlord not to do what he was planning to do....

Yes, but the reason it's simulcast is surely because there's no point doing any other football programming on Saturday afternoons because they can't show any matches because of the blackout so they may as well show Soccer Saturday. There's nothing else more relevant they can put there. And of course it predates Sky Sports News, it grew out of Sports Saturday which was on Sky Sports 1 since it began.

If you're a football fan, what are you most interested in on a Saturday afternoon? It always used to baffle me when on Sportscene on BBC Scotland, in their results bit they had Stuart Cosgrove talking about the week's football with a panel - who wants to hear about last week's football at 4.45 on a Saturday? Similarly when Setanta used to start their build-up at 4pm on Saturdays and did a hopeless compromise where the build-up was interspersed with scores and goalflashes, making it the worst of both worlds.

I used to prefer Setanta Sports News actually. I thought the build-up to the matches were better, and the results were better too. This relauch is a real chance for SSN to become the best Sports News Channel in the world, and I think it will use it. First off. Go 16:9!

How will going 16:9 enable it to become "the best sports news channel in the world"? Especially when it will need to remail 4:3 safe in SD?

Is the SD version definitely going 16:9?

Not sure how the results could be better, but I always thought Setanta's build-up was awkward, with Angus Scott having to shift from fronting a rolling news service to a relaxed conversation. They'd have been better off either having someone else in a studio doing the scores (which they did on Setanta Sports News, but only for the first half, and in the second half simulcast the build-up from Setanta to remind you to subscribe some more times) or just assume people can get that info elsewhere and start at 5pm, as ESPN did.

The other problem with the build up on Setanta was that they kept on telling you to subscribe, including for a time a "SUBSCRIBE" DOG permanantly on the picture, as the build-up was unencrypted, which was simply bad manners to those viewers who had already subscribed.

Also, Setanta Sports News confirmed itself as the world's worst news channel when Phil O'Donnell of Motherwell died during an SPL match, a competition of which Setanta were the main broadcaster, and they more or less ignored it, while Sky and the Beeb gave it non-stop coverage.

I notice there's ads now trailing the move from Freeview - but also with a sneak preview of the new look. If that's what it's going to be, it's pretty fancy!

Video:
http://www.skysports.com/tv_show/story/0,20144,12975_6286710,00.html