BET HD has launched in the UK, specifically for the BET Awards, which will be shown at 8:30pm on Saturday, July 4th. The broadcast is being marketed as exclusively available to Freesat viewers.

“Being able to broadcast this year’s BET Awards exclusively on Freesat in HD is a real coup and we hope Freesat viewers will really enjoy watching some of the world’s biggest entertainers like Beyonce and Jay Z with amazing HD picture and sound quality," said Freesat managing director Emma Scott as reported by Digital Spy. BET is The Black Entertainment Television network, and their awards promote the best African American talent in the fields of TV, film, sport and music.

Ms. Scott is clearly living in a utopian marketing bubble however, because BET HD is also available to anyone who has a Sky+ HD receiver.  Adding the channel is achieved in exactly the same way as adding ITV HD, with just a couple of minor differences.

Firstly, follow steps one to five in our guide, ITV on Sky HD.  Then enter the following details, as shown in the screen below:

Frequency (GHz): 12.730
Polarisation: V
Symbol Rate (Mbaud): 27.5
FEC: 2/3

After pressing the yellow button to “Find Channels”, BET HD will be listed as Freesat HD F6U as in the screen below.

Simply store the channel as detailed in our ITV HD guide, and viewing it is exactly the same too; go to “Other Channels” under the “Options” menu (the same caveats about EPG listings and recording apply).  Currently the channel is showing a ident card, but come Saturday night, fingers crossed, Sky HD viewers will also be able to view the BET Awards... with amazing HD picture and sound quality. Thank you Emma! 

BET HD, a Freesat “exclusive” that's also available to Sky HD customers (the dodgy colour is their fault, not ours). The SD version of BET can be found on the Sky EPG at channel number 191 and on Freesat channel 140. Both are free to air.

The latest stupid decision from the powers that be at ITV is to limit their upcoming HD channel to the recently launched Freesat platform.

Freesat is the free, satellite offering (hence the name) from ITV and the BBC that aims to provide digital television to those unable to obtain reliable Freeview reception.  For a "one off" payment and the cost of the hardware - £200 receiver, dish installation, HD-ready TV - they're going to offer eighty free-to-air SD channels and coming soon, two HD channels, BBC HD and ITV HD.

Most of the "free" channels are already available via Sky without a subscription, the likes of BBC Three, QVC, Bid-TV, Teacher's TV and Al Jazeera, so there's no reason to get excited about any of that.  But what about the HD? 

BBC HD broadcasts for just a few hours a day, as will ITV, but in addition ITV will be a "Red Button" only service and now that trials have begun, appears to be broadcast using non-standard H.264 within a H.222 transport stream, which makes it totally incompatible with most other HD receivers, including the 550,000 Sky HD boxes that are already installed.  Michael Grade claims he wants HD to become as widespread and as accessible as possible, meaning this decision makes even less sense.

A climb-down is inevitable when ITV realise they're losing out on a considerable amount of advertising revenue and Grade is already laying the groundwork by not ruling out negotiations with Sky. "We are a commercial organisation and won't give it to Sky for nothing."

Well Mr. Grade, Sky probably don't consider your programming worth paying for and what's more, if ITV used a standard HD broadcast method, every Sky HD owner could watch the channel completely free of charge without ITV having to involve Sky at all. 

So the question is; why bother with Freesat?  If you're going to the trouble of installing a satellite dish, then Sky is the obvious choice, depending on the package the hardware and installation costs less (£150), there are more free channels both SD and HD (BBC HD, Channel 4 HD, Luxe TV), the possibility of upgrading to the premium services and a whole host of HD sports, movies and documentary channels just a telephone call away.