I went along to watch the big football match in a room above a north London pub last night, courtesy of Freesat. The company, which showed the game in glorious HD, was keen to flag up its first birthday and celebrate a very successful first year. This is all well and good, but does Freesat really provide the best value out there?

Freeview seems to be dominant free digital TV format out there at the moment, but it's hamstrung by the amount of channels it can broadcast. The hope is that when all the analogue channels get switched off (the big switch-off has already started in some parts of the country), there will be more bandwidth to play with. However, if everything goes HD in the future, then I've always wondered whether there will be enough bandwidth to broadcast a shed-load of HD channels.

Freesat, of course, doesn't have that sort of problem because the channels it broadcasts use satellite as its means of transport. Already there are are 140 free channels on there and, speaking with various Freesat people last night, more channels will be broadcast throughout the year. It also plans to launch the iPlayer service (already available on Virgin Media's digital cable service) later in the year, which is another good thing. We all know how iPlayer has revolutionised our television watching over the past year or so.

So Freesat has had a very good first year. It says that 400,000 people have signed up in the last 12 months, so it's growing nicely and is providing plenty of choice to people who want a wide choice of channels but don't want to pay for any Sky subscription packages.

Whether this extra choice - which includes channels like Russia Today, Audi Channel, France 24, Home & DIY, NHK World and Men and Motors - really represents cutting edge programming is another question entirely, but in terms of numbers alone Freesat does provide the best deal in digital TV. For now.