For a while I watched the Freesat on a sky box, A couple of weeks ago I bought a Freesat box hoping I'd get more channels like Dave which is Freeview to my horror I actually got less, the qualities sub Youtube video and changing channels is awkward.

So why aren't all the Freeview channels on Freesat?

If the channel is free to air on satellite then it's because the broadcaster chooses not to pay the freesat epg fees.

If it's encrypted for drm reasons it can't be on Freesat even if the broadcaster wishes it to be.

This question has been asked so many times... Search function?

Or use Google to find your answer

You didn't get Dave on your Sky box either which should have been a clue.
But the facts are there are more channels on Freesat and FSFS than Freeview, just not all the same ones. You didn't do your research.


Disagree. In the main the channel quality on satellite is better than freeview due to the increased capacity. The Channel 4 suite and ITV's all have better picture quality on satellite than on Freeview.


You're better off asking the broadcasters as it's their decision.

Sky is clearly not a fan of Freesat

The channels that are common to Freesat and Sky are exactly the same. There are not separate versions for the two platforms. So the quality should be exactly the same.

If it is not then it is the equipment you are using that is responsible.

I thought freesat had more room to works with and it has much higher quality broadcasting?

If you mean more possible frequencies to allocate and the possibly of giving higher quality then you are correct. It is up to the broadcasters as to what they actually do.

Generally that is correct but it depends entirely on the broadcaster and how much space on a satellite they are prepared to pay for, the potential is there but if a broadcaster is not prepared to pay for the capacity then the quality will not be there. Freesat is just an epg they apart from the epg broacast nothing.

There are hundreds of channels on satellite many with extremely poor pictures simply because of the broadcasters policy of quantity over quality.

There is a new satellite recently launched (Astra 1N). Channel 5 have paid for 1 transponder (Mux in Freeview terms) and have compressed too many channels onto the same frequency, as a result the picture quality is unusually much inferior to the terrestrial Freeview pictures.

This is entirely down to the broadcaster (and Channel 5 are by far the most incompetent of the so called PSB broadcasters) and nothing at all to do with Freesat. The picture quality is the same on Sky - It would be it's the same transmission

They can't even get series recording right.

It's generally thought the BBC restrict the picture quality on Satellite so as not disadvantage Freeview-HD picture quality.

I'm toying with the idea of moving on to Freesat and getting a Humax, do the boxes really up scale the SD pictures ?.

Yes, but so does your TV anyway.

It depends how you set it up. If you tell it to output a fixed resolution, e.g. 1080i, it will upscale SD to HD. If you tell it to output 576i, it will downscale HD to SD. If you tell it to output original resolution, it will not do any scaling itself, instead your TV (if it's HD) will upscale SD to HD.

There is a debate as to whether a STB's scaler is better than a TV's scaler, but to be honest I couldn't tell the difference, and I have a Panasonic TV. So I prefer to let the box upscale itself so that it always outputs 1080i as this way you get instant channel changes on the TV instead of the TV having to detect the resolution and switch modes, giving a momentary picture loss and a DOG in the corner for 5 seconds!