How to watch Sky Arts - Portrait Artist of the Year 2018 without subscribing to Sky!

I do like a good television art competition!

Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year 2018 started streaming last night with the first episode of this year's competition

• see my earlier blog post Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year 2018 - Call for Entries for the details of how people got to take part

Some of you may recall that I'm particularly interested this year as last April I got to attend (and photograph) one of this year's heats as it was being filmed. 

• see Watching a heat of Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year 2018 - where the only thing that got posted was photographs of people's palettes - which are of course always very interesting!

So naturally I'd like to see the programme and find out how everybody does.

I might even write commentaries as I do for the BBC's The Big Painting Challenge! :)

• see Review: The Big Painting Challenge FINAL 2017 for links to all my commentaries on this BBC series.

Plus it reminded me that in my post The Top 10 Art Blog Posts of 2017 - on Making A Mark that I had to do a special section for the The Top 10 'Art on TV' Blog Posts of 2017 because my posts about on TV are so very popular!

So with that in mind I quite naturally had a whinge on Facebook about how it was such a pity that you can't watch this competition online without subscribing to Sky TV - which I simply won't do because I really am NOT going to shell out £20 per month via a contract to watch one television programme!!

When are Sky TV going to wake up the notion there is an income stream to be gained from those who
* ONLY want to watch Sky Arts online and
* have zero interest in signing up for Sky TV?

In turn, there were lots of fellow whingers, all feeling exactly the same.

However one chap popped up and pointed out that you can watch Sky Arts via Now TV for £7.99 per month - with no contract.  Apparently what you do is buy a NOW TV Entertainments Pass and the show is part of the programmes they show.

So I looked at my television and I still have absolutely no idea at all how I get NOW TV on my television.

However I did find something in the Help Section which says How to watch NOW TV on a Mac

So now I'm going to investigate further. 

What are you going to do?

UPDATE:  I can now watch!  Here's what I did:

• downloaded the Now TV App onto my iPhone (which has unlimited mobile data on my Three package)
• bought a NOW TV entertainment pass (I bought one for three months at a discounted rated)
• found (with a little difficulty) the Sky Portrait Artist of the Year programme - including the first episode of the new series.
• I'll also be downloading it onto my iPad and iMac.

REFERENCE

 Gareth Reid is Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year 2017