If you were hoping to watch Sky Sports without subscribing to satellite or cable then you might be waiting forever, Sky has announced that it is suspending plans to launch its subscription TV channels on Freeview.

The Picnic service was unveiled last October with Ofcom reviewing its pay TV plans. However the TV regulator has spent so much time reviewing the plans that Sky seems to have given up on the idea for the time being.

"We want to invest in Picnic because it will be good for consumers and a good opportunity for Sky," a spokesman for Sky said. "But the blunt truth is that Ofcom has spent 18 months looking at our proposals and there is no end in sight."

"The Picnic team have done everything they can to prepare for launch and there's nothing left to be achieved until Ofcom makes its mind up. While regulation works at its own pace, no business can go on like this indefinitely so we've had to take some pragmatic decisions. We will decide whether to reactivate the project when we have regulatory clarity."

Should the service have successfully launched, it would have seen Sky News, Sky Three and Sky Sports News replaced with Sky Sports 1, Sky Movies and Sky One - all encrypted. A fourth channel would have been time shared between Discovery and a Disney channel.

It now look increasingly likely that Ofcom will reconfigure multiplex B to carry high definition versions of BBC and ITV using the newer MPEG-4 compression standard, which would be able to fit HD channels into the limited bandwidth of a terrestrial mux.

The future for 40 contractors working on the plans looks bleak and another 28 BSkyB staff will be redeployed elsewhere.

When plans for Picnic were first unveiled rival pay-tv outfits Setanta and TopUp TV lodged complaints with Ofcom.

However, the idea might return as the spokesman also said that Sky would "decide whether to reactivate the project when we have more certainty over the Picnic TV proposal."