BBC and ITV launches freesat - a new source of expat TV?

After many years of talking about it (and also owning the Freesat trademark), BBC and ITV have just announced that they're launching the FreeSat free to view satellite digital TV service and as a holiday Gite owner I'm quite interested in this news.

It's not at all that well publicised by Sky but they've been offering their own Free satellite TV service since 2004 which operates by the rather unruly name of FreeSat from Sky - a tongue twister of a name mainly caused by BBC already owning the FreeSat trademark name!

Sky would of course you rather purchased one of their contract offerings but it's little advertised that if you buy a Satellite dish and a Sky decoder then you can receive some 200-odd channels without requiring any kind of decoder card or subscription service at all. Admittedly an awful lot of the channels you can receive are not the sort of things you want to watch regularly (unless you like shopping TV or adult phone sex channels) but there is still more than enough that you can watch without a decoder card - BBC1, BBC2, BBC3, ITV1-4, Men & Motors, Zone Reality, Film 4, CNN, France 24, CBeebies, dozens of radio channels, etc, etc.

For some strange licensing reason you don't receive Channel 4, Channel 5, Five Life, Five US and Sky Three without a decryption card but you can pay a one-off £20 fee to Sky and receive a basic decryption card which enables you to watch these additional channels without any further monthly subscription. If you want to watch Sky One, UK Gold, More Four, E4 and most of the movie and other entertainment channels then you do have to take out a monthly subscription, but for me with our French Gite, the basic channel set is sufficient.

It's also not all that well advertised but the Astra Digital satellite broadcasts not just to the UK and Ireland but also to much of Northern continental Europe. For our Brittany Gite a standard-sized receiver dish is all you need but the signal reaches as far down as Spain and Italy (although a larger dish is usually required).

Back in March 2005 we bought a second hand Sky decoder box off ebay (they're readily available for £30 or so, usually from customers who are upgrading to Sky+ or SkyHD) and a satellite dish from a nearby BricoMarche in France and then I climbed up the ladder and erected the dish. A bit of wobbling it from side to side before we got the best signal we could and the job was done, a perfect UK TV picture. I did decide to start doing this at about 7:30pm in the evening so that's why it's rather dark in the picture (and it was even darker by the time I had finished), but all in all it was a comparatively easy thing to do.
Since then we've bought a second decoder box and also put Sky TV into the master bedroom in the Gite so you can watch TV in bed - luxury!

It's not immediately apparent from the Freesat website whether they're also broadcasting their 80-200 channels on the Astra satellite (so in other words my existing dish is already aligned to receive the signal and I wouldn't need to move it), or whether the list of channels is going to be substantially different from the Sky FreeSat offering, although the BBC digital package comparison Q&A seems to imply that there will be more major movies and sports programs on the Freesat offering so it's definitely one to keep an eye on.

Update:
I've just found in the Freesat Q&A that Freesat is "broadcast from Astra 2 at 28.2° East and Eurobird at 28.5° East" so my existing Sky dish which is aligned to the Astra 2 satellites should be able to pickup the signal without any problems.