sidecar or FTA

[lee635]

Woohoo, raise and promotion for me and the wife has secured employment. So it's time to do our part to help the economic recovery. Does anyone know of any good deals on a sidecar? The best I've seen is low 100's plus shipping. NPS had a deal where if you subscribed to Showtime for a year, you could get a sidecar for $50, is that still available?

I don't have a vc2 cage and am thinking of getting a sidecar to sub to a premium channel, then feed that channel through the house. Are the analog feeds, for say Showtime, duplicated in digital or would I need to pick an analog descrambler cage too? And can one still sub to just one channel on BUD?

Alternatively, what's up there in FTA for someone not really interested in foreign programming or sports? I love live news feeds and wild feeds.

[dishrich]

Originally posted by lee635
I don't have a vc2 cage and am thinking of getting a sidecar to sub to a premium channel, then feed that channel through the house. Are the analog feeds, for say Showtime, duplicated in digital or would I need to pick an analog descrambler cage too? And can one still sub to just one channel on BUD?

Yes, ALL the analog premium channels are duplicated in digital.
Yes, you can sub to just one channel.

Check w/NPS to see if they still offer the deal on the sidecar - if a sidecar suites your needs, it's probably the best deal out there.

[Jacob S]

I wonder how many more FTA we can expect after all of these new satelites go up along with SES Americom and Rainbow R/L DBS starting services?

[lee635]

I read sometime ago that an outfit was going to transition many of the currently free foreign channels over to a subscription service. Apparently, that's how it is in other parts of the world. Anyway, there certainly are many FTA foreign channels that want to be FTA for their own reasons.


I'm thinking sidecar but will have to sweettalk the DW into another gadget... ;)

[Jacob S]

Perhaps they want to be FTA because they get more viewers that way and make their money from advertisements. I wish there were more english speaking channels that were FTA. I am surprised that there are not anymore than there are now FTA to get their money from advertising, I figure that would be the way to go for some stations. There would be a market for it I think.