Can you receive Sky TV and British TV channels in France?

Question

I'm considering emmigrating and would like to know if I can recieve British TV channels and more importantly Sky TV channels in France.

I know the BBC run a world service and limited channels overseas but I want to know if i can recieve the signals for the full services of Sky and the BBC via a satalite dish?

Answer 1

The answer is yes, depending on your position in france you can get the service from BSkyB with different sizes of dishes.

If you are going to relocate to northern France you will need the same dish used in the UK to recieve all the channels, as you go more to the south you will need a larger diameter dish ( up to 120cm), if you can install a dish with this diameter or larger then you don't even to consider this as a problem.

The reason for the difference is that the channels are broadcasted on four different sattelites, each of the four covers different areas, some of them give good signal in all of france and the UK, and some of them don't.So you can use the small dish used in the UK to recieve only some channels in all the areas in france but not the whole lot.

The only problem you might face is legal problems, and whether you can make a supscription in the UK and take it with you to france,or will all the channels be available for subscibtion in france

If you do a fast search you will find many websites offering the installation of Sky in France and I would say that they would give you the difinite answer about the last bit.

Answer 2

The answer is yes. I used a 80 cm dish when staying with the in-laws in Nice. Reception is supposed to be weaker in the south, but the 80 cm dish worked fine for me. I only used 80 cm because there was a spare one in the appartment. It may work with a smaller dish.

A friend gets excellent results in Paris with a Sky minidish he bought in a car boot sale in London.

I haven't tried to get the pay per view stuff that needs the phone connection though.