Sky Account?

[Bead]

Hello.

I'm moving to France soon from the UK.

I've looked around for an answer to this question, but it's one of those things, ask ten people the same question and get twenty different answers.

I know I need to take a Sky box over with me, and I need to have a Sky account. Is it better to set up the account in France or to set it up in the UK before I leave and pay for it through my UK account?

The house I am moving into has a sky dish and cables, I have a Sky Plus box. Someone mentioned that the cables for plus and normal sky might be different, but I'm lost on that one.

Also about plugs. While on Holiday I use an adapter plug, but is that suitable for long term use, or can I rewire the plug or swap over or some other more permanent solution?

Thanks in advance for any help. Sorry about the tall order of barely coherent questions, but I've been trying to find the answer myself and have just ended up even more confused.

[Pads]

Hello Bead welcome

Well I have been using the adapters for over a year , my brother for 10 years I dont think it matters. Over the years you will replace things with new french things.

As for the sky box I believe you have to keep the account in England as they dont really allow you to take it to France but every one takes theres with them. can you not take your old dish with you to, if your worried about the cables ? Once you get out there you will find lots of people who setup uk sky for you they will know.

Where in france are you moving to ? some one local will be able to tell you about good local sky fitters

Good luck      

[Val_2]

You must have a UK address for a Sky account, they are not allowed to knowingly sell you the system if you live in France so you need to make any phone calls via a mobile or from the UK. If they do discover you are not UK resident they will cut it off without warning and you need the UK address to receive the viewing cards when they are often updated plus all the UK I believe, installations are connected to the phone as well which you cannot dohere.  Be careful of some installers in France and to the legality of where they have obtained their boxes and cards, one recent case here in Brittany has revealed a customer with a UK address was being used by an installer to sell other cards from that same address,so choose a properly french registered and recommened person.

[Bead]

Hi.

Thanks for all the help. Almost every site I looked at

said I had to create the account in the UK, but one site talked about

setting the account up in France and it threw me off.

I can't

take my old dish because I actually use cable at home, but I purchased

a sky box because the cable might not stretch. I can try though :)

So I'm going to get my sky account set up for a UK address today or tomorrow.

About

the phone. Yes I noticed a phone line on the back of the Sky box. Do I

have to keep that plugged in? Permanently or just during the

installation?

The adapter plugs work. Yay, guess it's time to go out and buy a bunch of them.

Oh and I'm moving to Chantilly.

Thanks again for all the help.

Bead.

[Val_2]

We have no phone line plugged into our digibox neither have any other friends here with SKY.  If you set up your account in the UK with a relative make sure they understand that you live there too but cannot come to the phone currently as SKY ring ocassionally to check the service is OK so they don't just drop you in it by saying you live in France.

[Eslier]

Bead, you only need a Sky account if you want to receive the premium channels: Sky Sports, Sky Movies, Sky One etc.  If all you want to do is receive the standard free channels BBC1234, ITV1234 etc. then you don't need an account at all and your box will pick up those transmiossions without any problem.  To pick up Ch4 & Ch5 you will need a Freesat card which you can buy from Sky whilst still in the UK for a one off payment of £20.

The advice that has already been given regarding it being against Sky's T&Cs to view these transmissions in France is correct but it is a practice which is commonly ignored by Sky as long as you don't tell them what you are doing !

The dish already installed at your house should be fine if it has already been used for receiving Sky signals. If it has been used for picking up French satelite TV then it may need realigning and you will need to make certain it has a "universal LNB".  To be able to make use of the additional features offered by your Sky+ box, the LNB will need to have two or more outputs. You will need two cables coming from the LNB (the bit on the end of the arm on the dish set-up) to your digibox.

[Nicos]

Do you know if you have to activate the Freesat card in the UK before setting it up in France??

[Barbel Bob]

Hi,

 

Sorry to butt in on the OP!

 

If we set up the account at a relatives address that already has sky is that a problem? And if they offer to come and install the box do you just tell them that your going to do that yourself?

 

As we are bringing our dish and cables with us, I was hoping we will we be able to still have the SKY+ facilities and multi room facilities that we have in England? We want to continue with the full package! My OH would die without sky sports!

 

I have been offered a phone number of a local man to come and sort Sky out for me.

 

Thanks

J

[peebee]

When we put our card in the digibox for the first time a message came up on screen with a phone number to ring and register the card.  I used my U.K mobile to ring them and they asked the card number and told me that it would be actived over the next few hours.  Everything was working within about 2 hours.  Before we lived here in France permanently we used to turn off the electric before we returned to the U.K (to comply with our insurance) and on return to France we often had to wait between 6 and 12 hours for all the channels to 'tune' themselves back in. 

Good Luck 

[Will]

If you get a subsidised Sky box, then the contract says you need to keep that plugged into the phone line for a year. Obviously, if you plug into a French phone line then Sky will not recognise that. So if you cannot wait a year it is better to buy a box outright, either from a specialist dealer or through something like Ebay.

Although I don't know much about Sky plus, I have been told that this has to connected to a phone line to give you the extra facilities. So for France you are probably better off with a standard box and something like a DVD recorder to allow you to watch things later.

[peebee]

We made sure that the person whose address we used (the mother in law!) didn't already have Sky, so I'm sorry I can't answer that one.  We have Sky+ and the full package also we have the same multi room facility that we had in the U.K.  Only problem is that you can only watch the same channel as the main t.v and change the channel by the main t.v.  If you want to watch different channels I think you probably have to have two separate digi boxes?  The guy who installed our system used to be a Sky engineer in the U.K so we had no problems with the installation.  My OH is the same and couldn't survive without Sky Sports!

 

[Panda]

Hello

Just to add a point, installing sky is very straightforward and if you have a box already then there is lots of info available regarding where to point the dish etc.  We have moved a number of times and have only once had to call in someone to 'line it up', the problem that time was line of sight so postion of the dish is important.

I would advise having a go yourself first, what have you got to lose, that way if it works great, if not call someone in, you may save a few hundred euro's!

Panda

[AnOther]

I brought my Sky box to France with me and transferred my subscription to my daughters address. She does not have Sky, nor ever likely to want it, but in any case, there is no reason why there should not be 2 subscriptions at the same address, for a granny flat or rented rooms would be 2 obvious examples. I told them that there was an existing dish there so didn't need an engineer to call. Dead simple.

There are a number companies in France offering to set you up with the full Sky + package without a UK address or phone connection but I have no idea how they get around (or away with) it.

Val_2 suggested that Sky phone you occasionally to check if everything is OK. I have never ever heard of this nor been called in perhaps 10 years of subscribing, nor know anyone else who has, besides, if you move, like we have done I wasn't asked for nor did I offer an new phone number.

[Fridgeman]

[quote user="Bead"]Hello.

I'm moving to France soon from the UK.

I've looked around for an answer to this question, but it's one of those things, ask ten people the same question and get twenty different answers.

I know I need to take a Sky box over with me, and I need to have a Sky account. Is it better to set up the account in France or to set it up in the UK before I leave and pay for it through my UK account?
The house I am moving into has a sky dish and cables, I have a Sky Plus box. Someone mentioned that the cables for plus and normal sky might be different, but I'm lost on that one.

Also about plugs. While on Holiday I use an adapter plug, but is that suitable for long term use, or can I rewire the plug or swap over or some other more permanent solution?

Thanks in advance for any help. Sorry about the tall order of barely coherent questions, but I've been trying to find the answer myself and have just ended up even more confused.
[/quote]

 

Hi Bead and Welcome

Just a few points

You do not need to bring over a sly box (NOT a spelling mistake) with you to watch British TV (not channel 4, 5) only if you wish to watch sly channels, if you are happy with BBC 1,2,3,4, BBC news 24, CBeebies, CBBC, ITV 1,2,3,4,also +1 and ALL the regional channels (NI, Wales, Yorkshire etc) and all the FTA channels, Men and Motors, golf , Movies for Men to name a few.

All these channels can be received by a standard Digital stb available in France the full kit is about €70/80 stb, dish, dish bracket, lnb you will also need coax cable PLEASE get the correct cable for Digital Receiver NOT for TV, normally as a bonus the dish is 80cm for a better signal.

 

Hope this helps

 

 

 

[Will]

If looking at the ordinary Sky boxes, then apparently the Panasonic ones are the ones to go for, as they are far more sensitive, so better for low signal strength/quality areas. We had an old Grundig one in France which worked fine, but needed resetting frequently, so we have kept it as a spare and replaced it with a newer Thomson one which is much more stable, and responds quicker (an identical Grundig in the English house was destroyed by the cat peeing through the air vents). I'm told that Sonys are also good for use in France. Any of them can be bought on Ebay much more cheaply than from any of the companies that supply Sky packages for France. The remotes are common to all Sky standard boxes, though newer ones have more recent software that can control newer tellys. We even found a Sky remote code for a Leclerc own brand portable TV, so no problems there.

We've always managed to set up the dish and box ourselves though we do have an expert acquaintance we can call on if necessary (a guy who has a private TV aerial museum in England, would you believe). One essential bit of maintenance is to regularly cut back the wisteria from around the dish, and give the dish connection a good squirt of WD40 while up the ladder, as the signal can fall off badly when it rains.

[AnOther]

[quote user="Will"]....and give the dish connection a good squirt of WD40 while up the ladder, as the signal can fall off badly when it rains.[/quote]Hmm, bit of dodgy science behind that one Will.

Firstly, I'm sure you know that the signal drops off in rain due to path attenuation and if WD 40 can diminish that you're really on to something [I]

Secondly, if the cable is properly fitted and waterproofed then there should be no need whatsoever to WD40 it nor indeed will it have any effect.

On the other hand though, if it is less than perfect and there is any possibility of moisture to ingress, then WD40 will get in even more readily and do just as much damage to the cable, it is a penetrating liquid as well as a moisture displacer !

You could also argue that spraying the LNB and/or connector might actually cause problems because you are forcing liquid into places where it would never get by simple exposure to rain.

It makes me cringe when I see people merrily blasting their cars with a high pressure washer totally oblivious to the potential damage which could be caused by driving water into places where it could never possibly get in normal use on the road [+o(]

[Bead]

Hi. Once again thanks for all the help.

The house already has a dish installed (the previous owners were from the UK) so I'm not too worried about that, though I had no idea rain and trees could effect the signal like that. I would have though sending the signal from space would be the hard part.

Thanks for the tip about Freeview Fridgeman, but there are too many channels that freeview dosn't recieve (and I'm addicted to Lost).

Will you mentioned that a normal sky box would be better because it dosn't need to be connected by a phone line. Well I already have the box (long story...one that dosn't even involve ebay) so will it refuse to work at all without a phone connection, or will it work but lack the interactive features and tv guide? I've never used them anyway.

If not I can easily get a normal sky box.

[Bead]

Hi.

I'm packing right now so I don't have a lot of time. I have the Sky and Sky Plus box here, which one should I pack?

Thanks again.

Bead.

[AnOther]

Well according to this thread http://www.completefrance.com/cs/forums/1028312/ShowPost.aspx  both will work in France, including HD, without a phone conection but I'd pack both anyway [;-)]

[Bead]

Ooo, greed. I like that idea :)

::packs both::

[andyh4]

[quote user="Bead"]Hi.


The adapter plugs work. Yay, guess it's time to go out and buy a bunch of them.

Bead.
[/quote]

 

Please please please don't.

I had an appliance run for 2 1/2 years on an adapter.  Then one day without warning it decided to draw a little more current (I assume) and the adapter melted leavinf live pins sticking out of the molten plastic.

Nothing wrong with the appliance.

 

Adapters are suited for occasional use low power items and your box may well be low power but will probably not be occasional use.  It is so easy to fit the correct plug, so don't take chances - it could be your dream burning down or someone getting electrocuted.