Sky News now free-to-air on Irish DTT platform

As of 10.55am today, Sky News has been available free-to-air on Ireland’s Saorview platform, in standard definition.

Test transmissions for the news channel started on the Irish digital terrestrial network last week. Test card and tone was in use initially but this gave way to a Sky News logo (and silence) on Saturday,

At 9.32am today, the channel switched from 528×576 to 704×576. All other SD (standard definition) channels on the platform are 528×576.

At 9.33am, the 2RN test card (with integrated digital clock) and tone appeared. The test card remained in place (albeit with some brief interruptions) until 10.30am.

At that point, the Sky News logo reappeared, but was subject to regular picture distortion. The video clip below starts shortly before the test card gave way to the Sky News logo.

Shortly before 10.40am, we had black screen and flashing green bars. This rotated with the Sky News logo screen for the next fifteen minutes or so.

Our video clip picks up the action at 10.54am (32 seconds in), where the flashing green bars are replaced by the Sky News logo. Audio from the news channel is then faded up before the vision mixes through to Sky News, just in time for the closing seconds of Ian King Live, at 10.55am.

It’s worth noting that the addition of Sky News to the DTT channel line-up has resulted in a couple of changes:

• A dedicated channel carrying a 2RN HD test signal has been discontinued.
• A test channel which previously showed a 2RN test card (with integrated digital clock), accompanied by the audio from RTÉ Lyric FM, is now transmitting test tone instead of the radio channel. The digital clock was absent from this test card over the last few days but reappeared this morning. UPDATE: at some point during the day on 1st December, RTÉ Lyric FM sound was restored.

During the test transmissions for Sky News, the Saorview Information channel – which previously carried a video-based help guide on a loop – now showed a static caption, listing out the channel numbers for the various TV and radio services. However, the video loop returned today.

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