For the love of cricket

For the last few months, we have been doing just fine with a broadband and phone package through Sky. For the privilege of unlimited broadband access (max speed 20Mbps) and free night and weekend phone calls to UK landlines, we pay just £22.50 a month. This includes a phone line rental of £11.25 through BT, which seems to own all the phone lines in UK. This includes VAT and all fees, unlike US where we end up paying 10-20% extra in terms of myriad fees (this is one thing I like here - in US you never know what the final bill will be). A couple of weeks ago, I finally bit the bullet and got a TV package.

In the US, we used to have broadband (speed of 20Mbps too), basic TV package and phone through Comcast, for which we paid about $110 a month. Neither of us watched much TV, but we are Internet addicts. Wife used to watch Food Network sometimes, but nothing useful came out of it. I used to watch key sports events like Super Bowl, Tennis grand slams etc. Then Comcast got smart and raised the cost of the package by $15. Verizon was laying out fibre optic cables in our area. So we switched to Verizon, got rid of the TV package and paid about $80 for phone and broadband. That's what we had when we left the country.

We had a TV in the guest house we stayed in our first few months in UK. I watched the football world cup games in the first month, but after that we hardly switched it on. When we moved to our new home, we decided we won't need a TV package. We bought a new LCD TV anyway just for Wii games and to watch DVDs. So why did we finally get a TV package? One word: Cricket.

There are few different TV packages in UK. There is a Freeview package, which offers 50 free channels. You would need a dish set up (cost: about £150) and a set-top box (cost: about £30), but you won't pay anything to anyone after that. Well, almost. In a typical English twist, you would need a TV licence, which costs about £145 a year, which goes to BBC and keeps it free.

Unfortunately, Cricket is shown only on Sky sports channel, which is not free. Sky sports package costs £20, but you need a basic Sky TV package, costing about £20 to add sports on top of it. Wife likes to watch Cricket too and there was no other way to watch Cricket legally. With the Indian cricket team doing well and world cup coming up in India in a few months, we decided to just get that whole package couple of weeks ago. The monthly bill would come to £58 (TV licence is extra), but I think this is at least 20% cheaper than a comparable package in US.

We get few Indian channels in our package, like Star Plus and B4u Music. Wife enjoys watching them once in a while. I enjoyed a couple of days of Test match Cricket when India played South Africa and it was a great experience. There were no commercials between overs unlike in India where you feel like watching the game between the advertisements. But during the innings breaks, the TV guys kept going back to the England - Australia test matches, since it is a big deal for them.

Incidentally, India is touring England this summer. We could not get tickets for one day games in Lord's and Oval (both in London) and also for weekend days in Test matches there - tickets got sold out eight months before the games! We got tickets for an one-day game in Rose Bowl Stadium in Southampton, which is about 30 miles from Basingstoke. We will be going with three other families as of now - it's going to be fun!

Wife had been happy so far that I never watched any sports obsessively. She will realize soon that being married to a Cricket addict and having cricket TV channels is the worst of all since the games go on for days!