One thing I hear from a lot of foreigners who want to live here is that they are interested in knowing about what options there are for Cable TV, Satellite TV and such.
Basically, in most any City in the Philippines, you should be able to get Cable TV. The quality varies, though. Here in our location in Davao City, the picture quality of the Cable TV is not very good, but it does vary. Most of the time there are lines going across the picture, a fuzzy picture, etc. It is worse when it rains. There are times, though, when we will go a day or more with a near perfect picture. On Cable, there are around maybe 50 channels or so. A lot of religious channels, and home shopping type channels. For news there is CNN International, Asia News Network and ANC (a Filipino version of CNN). Personally, I am a news junkie, and I feel that news coverage is not good on the TV here. I used to like watching Fox News, but they took that off the air a couple months ago. Our cable costs us about P600 per month or so.
For satellite TV, the only real option that I am aware of is Dream TV. We had Dream TV for several years and were happy with it. But, they started dropping a lot of channels off of the service. It was getting where religious channels, music videos and home shopping were the majority of what was on the Satellite. When it got like that, we dropped our subscription. There just was not much that we cared to watch. For the best subscription with the most shows, the price is P890 per month.
One thing that we really missed was getting many American TV shows. When we did get shows from the States, they were usually several years behind. Recently, I set up a Bittorrent client on my computer and I use Mininova to download current TV shows from the States (and other countries too). This is a real great thing for us, as we can watch TV shows that are current, and it’s a nice form of entertainment that we didn’t have before. The bittorrent client that I recommend for use is Azureus.
Another option that makes sense if you have decent internet connectivity in the Philippines and a friend or relative back in your home country … where you want to watch the TV "from" is a SlingBox. See http://www.slingmedia.com
The SlingBox is a tiny black box tha6 hooks to a home TV cable system as if it were another TV set and has a cable to plug into home internet network … cable modem, DSL, etc. The user on the overseas end then runs SlingBox software on his/her computer and watches whatever is on the channel selected back in the home country on the SlingBox. It's cheap, and it works, but it won't work with the kind of so-so connections many of us have her ein the Phils. (you also probably need a TiVo to record the shows in the US abd play them back at different hours … unless you _really_ want to get up a 3am ro watch Oprah LoL
Hi Dave – Yeah, I've heard about that Slingbox. If you have the ability to do Bit Torrent, the results would be better, because you can actually download the show and watch it, so connectivity is not an issue. Bad connection will just mean that it takes longer to download, but once you've got it downloaded, there are no pauses and such, because you have the whole thing on your hard disk before watching.
I would be interested in hearing from any slingbox users, though to hear how they like it.
The part I don't understand, Bob, is where you get the source data to download using BitTorrent? BitTorrent is just a doanload/file sharing tool. Somebody, somewhere has to download the show and make it available to BitTorrent users. This takes time, disk space and is almost certainly illegal for many shows. Although SlingBox has yet to be tested in a major court case it is probably legal, because only one viewer can "see" the shows, exactly as if they were physically present in the home country location. There is no "unauthorized recording or rebroadcast."
The thing I'd want to watch most, Major League baseball would be absolutely illegal to BitTorrewnt, and the MLB folks have gone out of their way to prosecute folks in the past, so I'm not going to head in that direction.
Anyway, unless the Internet situation evr improves for me it is all a moot point to me … BitTorrent would take all night to doanload an hour's woth of TV.
Hi Dave – The site that has the best quality of shows available is:
http://www.eztvefnet.org
Another site that I like due to the sheer quantity of different TV shows available is:
http://www.mininova.org
There are hundreds of sites where you can get Bit Torrent TV shows off the net. It has gotten to the point where virtually all TV we watch is through torrent downloads.
Back in the States I was never much of a TV watcher. I prefer to read and God knows I consume books. Over here it is no different, I really don't like tv and only watch when I am popping in a dvd. But the bad part is there are no really good book stores over here… man how I miss Barnes and Noble!
Hi Louis – Oh, how I would love to find a good bookstore! National Bookstore just doesn't cut it!
There is always Amazon. However I would bet that the shipping is prohibitive, especially buying new books.
Clive James was once asked "which country has the best television programs?". His response…."you mean 'Which country has the best American television programs'".
Hi Wayne – I have indeed ordered books from Amazon before. What I usually do is have them shipped to my US mail forwarding service, and then sent on with my mail. It is indeed expensive, but it's worth it if you are really wanting a good read that isn't available here.
Hi Laurence – Ha ha… good one!
I subscribe to easynews and download books for my mp3 player. I currently have a backlog of nearly 30 books stored on my player.
I also use this to download music, movies and tv shows. A newly released movie will be available for download within a day or two of its release although the quality is not very good.
I prefer actually having a book in my hand but the nice thing about having it on my mp3 player is I am able to listen to my book while mowing the lawn, raking leaves or the other mundane things of daily life. I am leaving in 48 hours for my flight to the Philippines where I will spend the next 51 days. The books on tape are a godsend on that 12 hour Seattle to Taipei leg.
http://www.easynews.com/
Easynews costs 9.98 per month and you get 20gb of downloads each month. What you don't use is rolled forward to the next month. I currently have over 200gb of downloads available.
Hi Gary – I had never heard of EasyNews, but I just looked into them a bit after reading your comment. EasyNews is a Usenet file sharing group. So, the legality of EasyNews is the same as through Bit Torrent. Hey, I use Bit Torrent, I admit that, so I can't really say anything. But, it would seem that you can get the exact same files free through Bit Torrent that you are paying $10 per month to get through EasyNews! Also, your bandwidth is unlimited. Both systems make heavy use of Usenet files for download. Thanks for sharing about EasyNews, though, it gives one more option for people who are looking for a way to download some entertainment files.
Hey Bob,
If you're doing a lot of downloading of potentially copyrighted stuff, check out PeerGuardian.
Thanks for sharing, Elisa.
Bob, the main difference for me is speed. I can download from easynews at 3,000 kb/s and I can't get anywhere near that with Bit Torrent. I also have Azureus and have experienced times where I started a download before I left for the office and found that it was not anywhere close to being done when I returned 9 hours later. Of course, download speeds in the Philippines are no where near what I can get here in the States. I will try both easynews and azureus when I am hooked up in my apartment in Angeles City next week.
For my purposes, the speed and knowledge that a download will happen is worth the $10.
Hi Gary, now that I understand! I've always had good luck on download speeds with Bit Torrent, but as you say, our download speeds are much slower here than there in the USA. I am doing good if I can get 900 Kbps downloads.