Now that the analogue signal has been switched off we are left with the all singing, all dancing, Digital TV. Digital comes in several guises on the Isle of Man, Sky (Paid Subscription), Freesat and FreeView. If you don’t fancy paying Sky a stupid mount of money each month then that leaves you with the options of Freesat and Freeview. Freesat requires that you have a dish and wiring in place although you can use your old Sky dish for this. However a lot of people are moving more and more towards just using Freeview because part of the deal of how it was sold was all the extra channels. This would be great except if you’re on the Isle of Man you can’t get a full freeview service…. or can you?
The problem is that the more remote parts of the UK get a cut down version of Freeview. Instead of the 40 or so channels that come with the full service we only get 15. What makes this even more annoying for Manx people is that our greatest export, the TT, is shown exclusively on ITV4 in the UK. ITV4 is one of the channels that is in the full freeview channel list but not on our cut down version.
How To Get A Full Freeview Service On The Isle of Man
There are ways and means and if you’ve got broadband then you are 99% of the way there. There is a website called TVCatchup which grants access to the full Freeview service, for free, to anybody in the UK (here is a list of all the channels you can watch for free). All channels are shown live, this isn’t some sort of iPlayer catchup service but live streaming of live TV channels. This can be viewed via various Apple devices, a PC, Android devices, Playstation 3 or just about anything else capable of showing streamed video. You can then either watch on your limited display size or even better just connect to your TV. From personal experience I’ve connected up to a 55 inch Plasma and the quality was fine.
If you want something specific then this Android tablet is cheap as chips and has a HDMI out, it works very well for watching the other Freeview channels on your TV. Basically though if you’ve already got something that you can connect to your TV then try using that, the TVCatchup website is free to use so it’s not like you’ve got anything to lose.