What's the deal with cable and satellite TV?

Watching television can be a costly business. A 25-year-old who takes out an annual TV subscription with one of the main providers and diligently buys a TV licence every year could shell out in excess of €35,000 over the course of their lifetime.

It's a lot of cash by any definition, but it doesn't have to be so bad - the same 25-year-old can, if they take advantage of a free satellite service, pay just under €10,000 over the same long life.

Despite the fact that this much cheaper alternative is available, more than one million Irish households seem quite happy to fork out around €400 a year for their viewing pleasure. One reader who rang PriceWatch last week isn't one of them.

She'd just opened her Chorus bill and was absolutely livid to see that the price of accessing her fairly basic service had jumped €30 to more than €370 per year. She didn't want to part with the cash but Chorus, she said, has her over a barrel.

The management committee in her apartment complex forbids satellite dishes and the other provider, NTL, doesn't offer a service in her area. She said she was seriously considering dumping Chorus and returning to "rabbit's ears" and snowy television.

"First of all, I can't understand why it is so expensive," she fumed down the phone to PriceWatch, "but what really bugs me is that I have absolutely no choice; Chorus has a stranglehold in the area." The good news for our disgruntled reader is that Chorus's days are numbered. The bad news is that it won't make any difference at all to the price she has to pay or to the level of competition, as it is merging with NTL under the banner of UPC Ireland.

UPC is planning a major re-branding exercise this summer and last week a spokeswoman told PriceWatch that the process, which involves aligning the pricing and TV packs offered by NTL and Chorus, was well underway. She said the TV package on offer had been expanded - hence the €30 price increase - and high-speed broadband services are in place, while a digital phone service will be rolled out later this year.

The spokeswoman was upbeat about the developments at the company, and well she might be. Business is booming for UPC and it remains the biggest provider of pay television in Ireland. At the end of March it had 210,800 digital-cable television subscribers.

When analogue cable and MMDS customers are included, it has nearly 600,000 television subscribers. It also has 62,900 broadband customers, second only to Eircom in the sector.

UPC's main competitor for Irish eyes is Sky, which is no slouch when it comes to billing. Available via satellite, it now has close to half a million digital subscribers in Ireland. The prices Sky charges are broadly similar to those imposed by UPC and range from €21.50 per month for an entry-level package to €66 for packages that include Sky Sports and multiple movie channels.

Upgrading to Sky Plus - which allows users to pause live television and record programmes onto a set-top box - will cost an additional €149, plus an installation charge of €45. High-Definition service, meanwhile, costs an even less palatable €449.

With the prices that the major companies are charging, it is remarkable more people do not take advantage of the freeview satellite services that are legally available throughout the country at a fraction of the cost. Fed up with paying big money to big operators, one person PriceWatch spoke to last week decided to take matters into his own hands. He bought a satellite dish in his local Lidl store for €100, attached it to a tree at the back of his house, and laid the cable in a trench he had dug through the garden. He now has lifetime access to more than 200 channels for less than a third of the cost of a Sky subscription for a single year.

If all the digging, cable-laying and tree-climbing sounds too much like hard work - and, let's face it, it does - there is another way of getting low-cost satellite television. Tony Moore, through his website www.satellite.ie, will do it all for you.

Moore offers installations for a one-off fee of €299. The service gives access to hundred of stations, including all the BBC channels, ITV, Film Four, a range of children's channels, multiple news channels, including Sky News and CNN, and a host of other channels that are, in truth, of marginal interest.

The Irish channels are unavailable via free-to-air satellite, as they are contracted to Sky TV, although they can be accessed via a normal TV aerial. Moore has been operating since 1994 and, while business is good, he says his hardest task is getting the word out and overcoming consumer lethargy. Although the service he offers might be significantly cheaper than any of the competition, he can't afford to bombard homes with flyers and play his ads on maximum rotation across the television channels he hooks homes up to.

Nonetheless, the service he and a growing number of other installers provide is worth a look. Mind you, it is hard for the sceptical consumer not to wonder where the catch is. There is none, Moore insists, although the absence of customer support and no guarantees of service might be one area where the freeview option falls down. Moore only sells and installs the equipment and cannot guarantee what channels will be available, so, in the admittedly unlikely event that the BBC or ITV pull their service, those with access to the free satellite service have no comeback.