In Cricket

What a pathetic state I’m in. I’m sitting up late at night catching the 20-20 match on…sheesh.. Cricinfo. You are right… I’m sitting in front of my comp and endlessly clicking the refresh button. This is pits.

I don’t have a set-top box or a Direct-to-Home (DTH) connection. I read somewhere that Doordarshan will telecast at least the India matches. Apparently, they are not. And so, here I am, sitting like a dud and cursing myself for not subscribing to either TataSky or Dish TV well before the 20-20 WorldCup started.

Missing today’s Ind vs Pak match was the last straw. First thing tomorrow morning, I’m going to pay up for a DTH service.

Now, to the question. Should I go with TataSky or Dish TV?

But before that, here are the channels that I definitely want.

ESPN
Star Sports
Star Cricket
HBO
Star Movies
Zee Cafe
Pogo
CNN IBN
NDTV
Discovery
National Geographic
AXN
Animal Planet

I first checked with Tata Sky. After all, there’s so much advertising around about TataSky that when I thought of a DTH service, they had my top-of-mind recall.

Unfortunately, TataSky had unimpressively crazy packages which had only parts of the channels that I wanted. In one package, they have the sports channels but the movie channels are missing and vice versa.

Dish TV hit it bang on. Their Dish Maxi plan had 12 of the 13 channels that I wanted and they came up as the clear winner. Dish TV gets my money tomorrow morning.

This decision means that I will now have to buy another TV tomorrow. Why? ‘Coz Dish TV doesn’t have the Sun TV channel and there’ll be uproar from the womenfolk at home. So, while one TV (read, Mom’s) will have the free-to-air channels which includes all the Tamil channels , the other (read, mine) will mostly be dominated by sports and movies. Finally, there’ll be peace at home.

More importantly, no more pressing the F5 button to follow live cricket.