The Reg have an early comparion of Skys and NTLTelewests HD services.

The packages

This is a fairly simple comparison at the moment. If you want to commit to HD go for Sky's satellite package. If you prefer to dabble and watch a little HD now and then the TVDrive is the better bet.

The Sky package costs £299 plus a further £10 a month over an existing Sky subscription. The TVDrive is £10-15 per month extra on top of an existing Telewest TV subscription. There is no one-off charge for the hardware though.

Rather early to get critical but that initial £300 is kinda harsh. Guess they are milking the early adopters.

thing is, most ppl don't have a choice, NTL/Telewest don't cover the whole country.

They could quite easily release hd for frievew right now but its all about the money. personally im going to wait until hd tvs come down in price and see which service people prefer before making a decision

No rob they couldnt its all about the bandwith on freeview and they would either have to compress the channels even more than they are now or get rid of most of them. Not to mention a large portion of the country still cant get freeview.

It's all about the money - I can't afford either the £300 or the £10/month extra for Sky, and I can't get NTL/Telewest. Hopefully they'll solve the bandwidth issues for freeview because I think that's my best bet. Until I can get HD cheaply, then I won't be getting a HD TV. Sad, really, because it is absolutely wonderful!

Its always been the way, if you want the latest tech then you have to pay for it, ok hi definition in the rest of the world aint the latest tech but sadly it is here

i didnt know that. well anyway im still going to wait. same when the high def dvds/blueray whatever come out - im going to hang on until i see which comes out on top

Over here int he Jolly old USofA we can get some HD Channels. I've only got an internal antenna that doesn't strech far from teh TV and have only managed to get a few HD chans. Saying that the the ones I have picked up show 24, American Idol etc.
Must say the over the air stuff seems slighly better than the HD cable stuff. All the cable stuff is 720p but one of the over the air channels is 1080i and looks much nicer. (tho stan will now tell me that my tv doesnt truley display 1080i and it shouldnt look any better)

Not sure how much extra we pay for HD over here, but I got an extra set top HD box for my room and pay $6 a month more, and we got a DVR Cable box to replace the old box i broke, which is an extra $10 a month.

Its swings and roundabouts m8 it will be outputting more lines and therefor more detail just your tv will have to scale it down again, so you could well see more detail for it, not as much as you would if you have a proper 1080 screen though. You will find that for films that have lots of fast movement say Lord of the Rings, will look better in prog scan because the movement will be smooth and fluid.