Question: My TV subscription bill is getting too much. A friend of my son told me that I can get movies for free using a set-top box. A shop in town is offering to sell one to me for €120 and says I just need to download something to get access, but I’m no good at this sort of thing. Can you advise?
Answer
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Yes. Don’t do it. What’s being described to you by that friend of your son and that shop agent is almost certainly an illegal ‘stream’. Most likely it’s an app or a software service that reaches for versions of a TV service that’s legal in a far away country – in the Middle East, for example – and simply relays it through to your box here.
Many such devices are known as ‘Android boxes’. Some people call these devices ‘dodgy boxes’.
They’re not uncommon but the resolution quality on them is often poor.
Like the salesman you spoke to, they promise free access to premium sports like Premier League football and recently-released movies. As a rule, you can assume you’re acting outside what the broadcasters consider to be legal if you’re accessing their premium content for free. These set-top boxes rely on dodgy online methods to route around existing television channel subscription methods to re-broadcast transmissions over the internet.
You won’t find Android boxes for sale in PC World or Harvey Norman. Instead, it’s smaller specialist retailers (mostly online) that market them.
Despite the fact that many of them brazenly market the gadgets as machines which ultimately facilitate access to “a large number of films which are still running in the cinemas”, they cannot actually sell them as pre-programmed devices specifically ‘loaded’ with piracy-enabling software plug-ins. (In the UK, small retailers who sell Android boxes set up this way are now being arrested.)
That means that people determined to get at such copyright-skirting premium content need to set up their Android boxes themselves.
You’ll hear people say that it’s an inevitable side effect of the internet, that ‘content’ can’t be shuttered in by ‘artificial’ copyright boundaries applied to different countries.
I’m not going to try to defend the copyright system that movie companies and sports’ rights bodies have constructed, which can sometimes seem arbitrary and unfair. But I will say that you are being lied to if you’re told by someone in a shop that you can buy a set-top box for €120 and get access to premium TV, movies and sport “for free”, just like you were subscribing to Virgin or Sky. You can’t, legally.
That said, if the reason you’re considering this is that the monthly bills are just getting too much, there are other options. These are principally Saorview and (or) Freesat.
Saorview is the free Irish television service, offering the RTÉ and Virgin Media channels. Freesat gets you most of the terrestrial British stations, such as BBC, ITV and Sky.
You can also get a number of satellite stations, such as MTV, if you use a box that connects to broadband.
You won’t get the likes of Sky or any of the other cable channels (including the premium sports channels) through this method. But it will definitely cut your bill. In fact, it will reduce the monthly payout to zero, unless you’re paying for your TV licence in monthly instalments. To get these, you may need an extra set-top box. If you live in a house, you can opt for a ‘combi box’ (about €100 from retailers like Harvey Norman or PC World, although you’ll also need a satellite dish or aerial and to pay an installer) that draws TV stations through an aerial, a satellite dish and broadband.
Installed and plugged into your telly, the box will give you Saorview and Freesat stations.
But if you live in an apartment, an aerial is likely to prove difficult or impossible, especially with local authority rules that often ban artefacts such as aerials or satellite dishes on apartment balconies. It is common now for apartment blocks to offer a group satellite scheme, which you may be able to connect to for a fee (or as part of your management fee membership).
Sadly, there appears to be no broadband-only equivalent of Saorview or Freesat available. This makes it much more difficult to use a PC or a laptop as a primary TV device.
In an age of Netflix, it’s an increasingly bizarre and outdated restriction from these broadcasters to not allow mainstream online access (other than the handful that offer very limited services through glitchy online ‘players’), but that is currently the way they see fit to limit access to their services.
An Apple TV set-top box is a very handy way to get Netflix and other online video sources on to your telly by using your home Wi-Fi. However, it doesn’t really do TV stations in the same way that other set-top boxes do. You can’t get RTÉ or the BBC on one, so it’s very much an add-on device.
Recommendation: Saorview (no subscription fee but around €100 for a ‘combi’ set-top box)
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