Now TV might work out cheaper if cricket’s all you want to watch on Sky Sports

As a cricket fan, one of the main problems with Sky Sports is that you basically end up paying for a load of channels you won’t watch.

You can subscribe to Sky Sports Cricket without all the other sports channels these days – but only if you first commit to a Sky TV package and a long contract. This basically means that you end up paying even when there’s no cricket on at all.

Go through Sky themselves and at the time of writing you’ll pay £18 a month for Sky Sports Cricket plus £22 a month for their Entertainment Package on an 18-month contract.

If you only want to watch cricket, £720 is a lot.

Sky do have a pay-as-you-go service too though: Now TV. We’ve been giving it a whirl for the England v West Indies series. It allows you to get access to Sky Sports without the long-term commitment, so we figure it’ll be cheaper in the long run. You can also access it via the internet, so you don’t need a load of gear.

We figured we could buy a one-month Sky Sports pass for £33 (actually £30 for the first month and a USB stick thing) and it would cover all three Tests. You can pay for a day or a week as well (which makes more sense now that the Test series is well underway).

You can sign up here. (Just to let you know that’s an affiliate link, so we get a small cut if you do so. (And if you do – cheers.))

The alternative to Now TV is to get Sky Sports through our broadband provider. But as we said at the start, that means (a) signing up to a long contract and (b) paying for a whole bunch of other channels we’ll never watch – something we’ve always found completely irritating.

In an ideal world we’d pay for Sky Sports Cricket only – but for the minute this seems to be the best option.

We’ve listed some of the pros and cons here. It’s not all positive. The main thing we’ll miss is the ability to record the highlights or watch them on-demand.