Their website does suck, but as per usual on Forumosa there is a bunch of misinformation, they have a booth outside NY NY in Taipei where you can fire away a few questions.
I had the guy navigate around the channels for me. They have a lot of the current cable box selections (ASN and all the Discovery NatGeo stuff) but they also have Food Network, NBA TV, NHL TV, Fashion TV etc…
The guy told me 30 English channels in all, a number which will go up in time (but knowing TW, I highly doubt it, unless of course they re-package it to charge you more).
Let’s see if we can’t figure out what these 30 channels are:
Food Network
NBA TV
NHL TV
Fashion TV
discovery,
natgeo,
discovery home & health,
discovery science,
discovery turbo,
natgeo wild,
natgeo adventure,
ASN,
a Korean channel
and a german channel (edit: Deutsche Welle)
So what are the other 16 supposedly English channels on this system?
I’d guess the “German” channel would be Deutsche Welle…
It doesn’t really look like they have much of interest, at least not to me. I think I’ll stick to downloading/streaming my TV programs…
Thanks for that channel list. It is better than I had been expecting from the previous posts. NBA HD sounds great now that it is playoff season, but I don’t watch enough basketball throughout the year to make it worthwhile. I’m disappointed that news channels like Bloomberg are not available in HD – I think those channels actually make the best use of HD because of the extra info.
As things stand, I’d think you’re better to approach your local cable company or MOD unless you’re interested in sports. At 1~1200 NTD per month, it’s vastly over-priced compared to the local offerings. In fact, getting MOD HD service AND HD tv AND regular cable through your local cable tv company may be cheaper and offer more channels (we’re thinking of doing that.) … Cable Bill = $500; MOD = $300 (approx.) and Cable HD = (?) still seems to be cheaper, and you get more choice!
I think that’s why it’s so hard to find out EXACTLY what channels are available on DISHHD as most of the channels are only standard SD, anyway.
You do know that you need a HiNet ADSL connection to get MOD, right? And you need a fairly fast connection as well if you want to use it for anything but watching TV over it, which adds up to another NT$1k a month…
Oh, yeah! I forgot about that one! I would have it anyway myself, but that’s not true of others, I’m sure. Though you needn’t necessarily have a Hinet account, I guess. You could just have the ADSL lines, since MOD is from CHT, not Hinet.
[quote]Hinet is CHT’s consumer xDSL service…[/quote]
But the point I’m making is that: the two services are distinct. You can pay for ADSL lines (as you have to) and use another ISP… so it should be possible to pay for MOD and not have a Hinet account.
Well, yes, you “should” and pretty much any internet service fast enough “should” work with it, but as it’s a CHT service, they only offer it if you have one of it’s xDSL lines and I’m sure there’s some kind of speed restrictions involved. It’s possible they let you use it on any connection these days, but at least initially was only working with their xDSL service.
If you’re in an area where Kbro provides cable TV, then they’re offering some kind of similar service in HD now that also features on demand movies and some other stuff. I guess this is the channel line-up kbro.com.tw/Program/prog_dtv_02.aspx
The Kbro packages are great. I have one of the more premium ones. Pretty much every channel listed on the previous page is part of the deal. Way too much TV to watch. Thankfully I don’t do too much of that. Their cable modem service isn’t bad either.
Those are some of my favorites, as it would be. History HD is super. I have the regular Discovery Channel as part of regular cable, but also splurged for the other three Discovery Channel offerings. It’s overkill, but variety is nice. My wife and I end up watching Crime Investigation channel quite often too. They had some good specials recently on the Charles Manson murders, and the Paul Bernardo / Karla Homolka case, among others. Biography Channel is another great option. Seems like there is always something good on there.
Those would be nice additions: I think our cable tv has History, CSI, but no biography channel.
I just switched on MOD, to discover that they are now offering music channels, albeit limited in scope. It seems that competition between the three providers is now beginning to hot up: MOD, Cable HD, and DishAsiaHD… wonder whether there will be any more entrants to the market…
They have reps in costco now. Did they before? Well now they’re in Kaohsiung.
Does anyone know the home requirements for a dish? Do you need an exposed area to put them in? I have 2 balconies at my place, west-east. If I can get the dish here I’m in, just for the NBA tv. But the other channels will be nice too.
