Why I got rid of Sky and saved £50 a month

I LOVE watching live sport. But while I have my Norwich City season ticket and attend occasional athletics meetings, for the most part I flop in front of the telly.

I’m willing to pay for that pleasure. However like millions of sports fans I am utterly sick of Sky’s stranglehold and outrageous charges achieved through complex price structures.

About a year ago I went in search of cheaper options. Now I pay less for TV and have more sport at my fingertips. My gripe with Sky is that it treats high-definition TV as a luxury whereas others offer it as standard. If you want

all Sky’s sports channels in HD you would also be expected to pay a whopping £38 a month for a package of entertainment channels you may never watch. Then it charges an extra £6 a month for sports HD on top of the normal sports channel charges.

It can cost £71.50 a month to watch its full range of sports channels in HD. So I fled to BT TV, where I now have its four sports channels and Eurosport all in HD, plus some sport in ultra HD. That gives me plenty of football and athletics. The £32 a month I pay also includes fast fibre broadband and phone — which I moved from Virgin at the same time.

I use Now TV — Sky’s internet-only offering — if I want to watch some extra football.

I’m currently paying £20 a month for this thanks to a four-month discount. When it ends I’ll pick and choose on a pay-as-you-go basis.

The picture isn’t full HD but it does seem better than that offered on Sky’s main standard definition sports channels. And it certainly beats shelling out more than £800 a year on channels I may never watch.