This week has seen BT SPort 2 and BT Sport ESPN change frequencies, and moved to the UK beam on the Astra 2 satellites.

This may mean loss of BT Sport channels for some areas of southern Spain and Portugal, as people satellite dishes are now too small to receive these UK beam signals for where they are located.

In my service area, viewers should not notice much change in reception – and BT channels should still be available on our popular 110x120cm satellite dish installations.

Sky digiboxes will automatically update to the new frequencies.

Users with other satellite receivers will have to per form a channels scan to continue to watch these channels on their new frequencies.

For a full BT Sport frequency list click here.

In addition, the BT Sport HD channels, including AMC HD, are now “hard paired”. This means that these HD channels are like other Sky HD channels, and are no longer available on card sharing systems, due to this “hard pairing”. This “hard pairing” incorporate a new level of encryption security, and is the reason why no Sky HD channels have been available on card share systems for over a year now. So if you have lost your BT Sports HD channels on your openbox, GI, Galaxy Innovations, Iberosat, Vu and Vu+ and Vu Due satellite receivers, then this is the problem.

Also, Sky Movies is now being offered to all Sky Movie subscribers in HD. The additional “HD charge” is now dropped, and you do not even have to subscribe to the Family Bundle (the HD pack) for Sky Movies in HD. This could simply be a way to get more people watching Sky Movies, especially when rival Movie networks, like Netflix offer movies in HD as standard. It could also indicate a move to make Sky Movies only available in HD, removing the SD (standard definition) versions altogether. Although this may mean that they would have to offer Sky Movie subscribers who are still using an older SD Sky Digibox a new HD Sky digibox. This would also mean that Sky Movies would disappear from card sharing systems, as Sky Movie HD are also “hard paired”. Given that there are thought to be less than 150,000 out of their 10 million subscribers still using a SD Sky Digibox, there is certainly incentive for Sky to follow this up.

tags: bt sport new satellite frequency, bt sport hd frequency, lost BT sport in Spain