Thank you for the vote of confidence Mike.

"whoever it is" has been installing in the Algarve for over 20 years, and has a large portfolio of happy Portuguese, Dutch, Belgian, French, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish (among others) customers, and is unlikely to stake a successful business on hollow promises.

Don't really know what this dreambox can all do but I know of someone who has it along with broadband(needed to make it work apparently), she pays a guy 10€ a month and some how gets EVERY TV Cabo channel available. Obviously not legal but neither is Sky?!

It's a LOT less legal than $ky. Receiving pay-TV without paying the broadcaster is a crime. Receiving $ky is only contravening the agreement with $ky i.e. not using it at the address specified in the contract.

something which is illegal is breaking a law
watching sky outside the area defined in the agreement is Breach of Contract, not actually breaking a law, but I should imagine that if you made an agreement to sell a house and having signed all the paperwork and then the buyer pulled out that would also be Breach of Contract. You would be mighty upset.

As with the house, Sky could as stated in the terms of the contract take you to court and require punitive damages and legal costs.
But they won't as it isnt financially viable to gather together all the information needed to take it to court. But as stated in the contract - you breach it they will turn you off - permanantly.

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So not breaking any laws just SKY terms and conditions? So, from what I am guessing is SKY would be breaking laws(or "rights") to intenionally broadcast abroad but the user could not face legal action? You said "less legal", so that has confused me a bit, is it legal or not?

I very much doubt Sky would want to cut off its users outside the UK as they would loose a fortune!

But Sky will be lost or not?

I don't think you will find it is as much as you think.
If you say there are 60000 expats here, half of them are partners/family, of those most just have Freeview.
If you say (generously) that 5000 have subscriptions of £65 per month, that is only £3900000 per year.
In 2011 Sky's profit (after operating costs) was over £1 billion.
When you take into account their operating costs it probably represents less than 0.5%.
Adding up all Expats within the footprint multiply that by, say, 20, it is still not that great a worry for them.
Secondly, Sky do not 'intentionally' broadcast abroad - the projected beam causes it - which is their argument for a narrower beam.
Basically we have been lucky to have what we have had (within the Terms and Conditions or not ) and should make the most of it while it lasts.

Hog your arithmetic is pretty bang on , and if anything is a bit higher than the reality.

Your expat tv abroad is predominately freeview , therefore non sky paying customers.

At the peak , including the forces , there was upto 1.6 million expats in europe , of course you have to draw down that number since the crash ,and presume that these are multi person households.This includes one footers but doesnt include holiday home owners , whom wont bother with the hassle and added expense only for a couple of weeks a year.

Very few had/have a sky contract , unless they have a uk premises and bank account for direct debits , to have a £65 subscription means all channels including movies and sports which too is rare.

The current schedule for changeover for all sky box channels is by spring 2014 for completion.BBC reckon they will be on this beam before then.

Currently there are people trying to sell the punter expensive modified Dreamboxes , that read your own sky cards or card share over the internet to get sky unscramble codes.

This wont make any difference once the beam changes to the tighter footprint , of course there is rebroadcasting ie iptv or retuning to the available feed on 27.5w for channels 1-4 , this will disapear too eventually most likely sooner rather than later.

http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1618285

By paying for card share your opening yourself up for some court time when the reseller gets raided , do a google for re broadcasters and court cases , if your direct deb is recorded with them , which it will be , then expect a knock.

Dreamboxes are pretty good bits of kit for the advanced sat user , not just for sky and brit tv , highly modifiable through the community itself , multi sat use and motrised , but given that they are expensive there is lots of knock off boxes being sold as premium , both have a high fail rate thus one should be very weary.Just cos the seller says genuine drembox doesnt mean it will be.

These boxes , or others like them , ie dreambox , tuxbox , vu+ and the like , well some of them can and do decode the higher freqs used by this alternative european feed at 27.5w.Basically its the broadcasters themselves backup feeds , thus your basic consumer stuff just wont cut it for tuning into them including freeview and sky boxes themselves.

The feed uses an old standard of decode that is installed on these boxes questionable legality , which is then emulated and used for unscrambling it.If your not a tinkerer then this is not plug and play for the end user , and could easily see you paying for home visits to programme the box regularly , if your not sure of upgrading firmware and how mulitple cam emulators work then its not for you.

When this feed will be rescrambled and effectively rendered useless I dont know , and neither do the installers and resellers.Sky branded boxes and freeview boxes well the majority cant decode this feed.

You have to reduce the figures further as some lucky people will still pick up the new UK spot beam in some areas of Europe ....

If I was the MD of a business that lost £3900000 I would be on a witch hunt what ever % it represented

And don't forget the thousands of bars etc. all over Europe, Balearics, Canaries etc. etc....

Even if it would cost more than the income in licences to do just that?Hence why your not an md

Most people just dont understand numbers , that how governemnts and companies control them throgh baffling.They see zeros and assume big numbers are good , thats why we are rarely given all the facts like net, gross and pound for pound percentiles.

ITs not a loss or lost income , but perhaps a potential loss of a potential income however its still not that clear cut....

Sky has a licence , an expensive one , to only broadcast to the territory of the uk for nealy all of its programming , both through uk govt licences and contractually through the program's themselves originators.

It does not have a EU wide one of either of those , so are breaking EU law and contract law , to knowingly sell an expat any services to be recieved outwith the uk.

IF sky were knowingly do this then the fine would be astronomical , pun intended.Which IMO is in direct conflict with the open market sentiment of the EU , but thats another thing entirely.We are talking radio spectrum here which , if mem serves , is still devolved to country specific legistlature for the most part outwith future shared domain strategies for forward progression.

This is one of the reasons why sky encrypt their services , it protects them from lawsuits and government fines for broadcasting content illegally , ie if you cant see it without the card to unscramble it then its not deemed a broadcast but background noise.The other of course is that the end user pays for content , 2 income revenue streams of advertising and customer accounts.

The radio overspill , which had enabled this reception in the past , will be gone soon enough anyway , and they wont be physically able to do so ever again....well unless the satelite is replaced with another with a wide footprint again.

Dont beleive me that sky CANT broadcast outside of the uk , call up sky and tell them you want a sky full package for somewhere outside the uk , except for sky Eire of course.

No matter what the number is , ie say the £3.9m or as a percentage of overall income generated by SKY , the end result is that it would be impractical to spend x to make a percentage of a percentage of x , or more correctly to deliberately make a loss when it projects a negative percentage of x , ie when you include the licences and new content contracts for overseas broadcast then it would thus take it negative.

You also have to add to this the avertising streams generated are uk specific products and services , which is what also pays for programming not just subsciptions.These advertisers simply are not interested in expats , rarely can you get their products outwith the UK - other than the likes of cars and coke etc , which again are a minority of the advert air time therefore a minority of revenue.

Be carefull there is a site calling its self SKYEUROPE,TV which has nothing to d with SKY and is just another of those " offering " a solution , at a cost of course to the loss of the main UK channels later this year.
Quite whow close to the law these people are sailing is debatable but lets hope that SKY goes for them big time.