230 channels on Freesat in 2009

In Wotsat’s chat with Emma Scott, Freesat Managing Director, its believed that 230 FTA (free-to-air) channels should be available by early 2009, however technical issues with Sky are limiting Freesat to launching them in batches.
Emma Scott said: ‘We wanted to launch with them all, but it was not possible.

We have got every free-to-air channel that wants to be on Freesat pre-registered already, and we expect to have have the full 230 early next year.It’s slightly decided by a timetable set down with Sky, which concerns the uplinking arrangements so we do not interfere with their EPG and they do not interfere with ours.

The EPG data is an additional component which is added to the broadcast stream, and they were not able to combine it for all the channels in time for our launch.’