Channel 4 to join Freesat next year

Channel 4's TV channels will be available on the Freesat platform from next year according to What Satellite magazine, although only Film4 will be on Freesat when it launches early next year, with the broadcasters' other channels -- Channel 4, More4 and E4 -- joining Freesat when Channel 4's contract with Sky runs out next year, and Channel 4 won't be renewing the contract.

At present, Channel 4's TV channels are what's known as 'free to view' (FTV) on satellite, which means that people don't have to pay a Sky subscription to view them, but they do need to watch them on a Sky digibox with a viewing card, because Sky encrypts the channels. But as the name suggests, Freesat is a satellite version of Freeview, so the main question mark hanging over the Freesat platform has been that the Channel 4 TV channels might not be available on it, so this news answers that question.

Five's TV channels -- Five, Five US and Five Life -- are also FTV on satellite, and there's been no news about them going on Freesat yet, but those channels aren't anywhere near as important to the platform as Channel 4's are, and I think Freesat could still be successful without Five's channels being on there.

Freesat -- lots of channels + HDTV + radio at higher audio quality

Free satellite is a bit of a hidden gem amongst the digital TV platforms, because most people don't realise that over 200 TV channels (albeit that a lot of these channels are not exactly premium content) and around 100 radio stations are freely available on satellite at the moment -- to see which channels are freely available on satellite see the channel lists on this website, and it is these channels that will be available on Freesat next year (apart from Five, Five US, Five Life and Sky Three, which are FTV).

Freesat will also carry the BBC HD, ITV1 HD and Channel 4 HD channels, whereas it looks like Freeview won't be able to carry a range of HDTV channels until 2012 once digital switchover has been completed. 

Also, quite a few of the radio stations on satellite are using higher bit rate levels than the same stations are using on DAB, so the audio quality will be higher than on DAB. Like on Freeview, the BBC uses higher bit rates for all of its radio stations on satellite (apart from Radio 3, which uses the same bit rate on DAB) than it does for its stations on DAB. The BBC could also very easily provide higher bit rates still for its radio stations on satellite, because it has a whopping 231 Mbps of capacity available (compared to a measly 1.18 Mbps on DAB!). Whether they will provide even higher bit rates on satellite remains to be seen, although it's likely that the BBC will try to avoid providing very high quality on satellite because it doesn't want to embarrass the pathetic DAB system that it backed.