I’m a huge basketball/hockey/football (both American and proper) fan and want to look into getting a satellite dish in TW. Although I doubt the answer will be yes, I’ll ask anyways. Can this be done? :?:
Yes. Getting a satellite dish is easy (Though I don’t know where the “electronic city” of Kaohsiung is, just ask your colleagues.), but the set you can see in most places is a complete package to receive one (Don’t know which one because no-one can tell me. There are actually a few satellites that at least in theory can be received in Taiwan.) satellite: Digital (Really?) programs, scrambled, monthly fees. The costs didn’t sound reasonable to me, so I didn’t ask any further. Huge difference to the satellite scene in Europe…
The problem with satellite service here is that, like the cable, they are run by shysters. You cannot simply choose which channels you wish to recieve and pay the fees.
Instead, just as with cable, you take what you get – maybe HBO, maybe Cinemax, definitely lots of home shopping and puppet shows. Its a joke, really.
mfass, do me a favour please mate. If yuo decide to get it, reply on here and tell me if you can get a ;
a) Aussie rules football.
b) Horse Racing from Australia.
If I knew you could get these programs, I’d definately be getting satellite. Actually at one of the Taiwan trade shows a couple of years ago, one of the venders wanted to sell me a dish for $NT10,000, but I wasn’y sure what channels from back home I would be a ble to receive, so I gave it a pass.
In April, I wrote this posting about how you can buy your own C-band dish (at least 180 cm in diameter), digital receiver, and PAL to NTSC converter to directly receive satellite channels that are “free to air” (non-encrypted).
But if you want to get a “package deal”, that’s different. Then you pay an installation fee of about 20,000 NT or 30,000 NT, and the company that offers it installs a small non-rotatable Ku-band dish for you (either 60 cm or 90 cm), and they give you a digital receiver which is capable of decrypting the Ku-band channels on a certain satellite. But then you have to pay a montly “subscription fee” of about 600 NT to 1000 NT. Read the details about it here.
What “local sports back home” do you want to watch? If you’re talking about Australian sports, then you can watch lots of games on the Australian ABC channel, which is “free to air” on the PAS 8 satellite, which is at 166 degrees East longitude, as well as the PAS 2 satellite, which is at 169 degrees. (You can see all the PAS 8 channels here and all the PAS 2 channels here.)
But if you’re talking about American sports or English sports, then you’re out of luck because I’ve never seen them on any satellite channel which is free to air.
By the way, there are a few encrypted sports channels on the satellites, but those channels are already on cable TV, and they don’t often show American or English games anyway.
Mark