They still have Star World in the Philippines…anyone else up for a weekly trip down there to watch Monk on Tuesdays?
I lost star world today and picked up a Vietnamese Mail order bride Channel three identical chanels of Bhuddist monks reading their scripture two home shopping channels and a new music station. Saw a Sheryl Crow concert, geez she’s been around for 10 years, even Eric Clapton played…
BTW got one more movie chanel and lost Hallmark…no big loss there.
Its all about contract renogation between the operators and the content providers. You pay thier price, your in with a good channel location. You don’t you get bumped around.
In addition to the channel jumping I’d guess y’all are experiencing a (tactical) poor quality feed for some if not all channels as well. No?
Daggummed Cable operators, friggen hate 'em.
Chou
The Yangming Cable fuckwits moved CNN to 97 – a grainy channel.
In Siem Reap, Cambodia they have, among other things, ESPN on two channels – one with action dubbed and one with the English. Amazing!
Wolf - that’s strange because I have YangMing too and CNN comes in quite well on 97 - the channel they had it on the past few weeks (104 I think) was really poor quality. They stuck Hallmark up there now.
I used to live in Japan and the cable system is much better there. For any show that doesn’t have subtitles, there’s a button you can press on the remote to get the broadcast in Japanese or English. The selection isn’t great but at least you can get Simpsons, Friends and King of the Hill, plus the American version of Sportscenter. Any reason they couldn’t do something like that here?
My cable is clear and fine, all the way up to channel 116 - but I can’t get 105, where cnn is supposed to be.
[quote=“Bu Lai En”]No use complaining, because they ARE run by gangsters. You can’t switch to another operator because rather than competing in the same area, they agree to split up the area between them. If you don’t like what your cable comapny offers, you can go to … nothing. There was a good article in the Taipei Times on this about 4 years ago. When I say the companies are run by gangsters, I don’ mean ‘shoddy operators who behave like gangsters’ - I mean gangsters. How else do you explain the illegal ads that cut in. Like the cable company or the goverment can’t do anything about it? Bullshit. The ads are preceded by a number you can dial to get your ads placed. It would be so easy to stop them.
brian[/quote]
Errrr, actually, the cable system out where I am was started by my next door neighbor, who sold it to a subsidiary of AT&T and retired a while back. He’s far from a gangster, his wife is a judge…and his kids are cool 
. They tend to move the channels every 2-3 months (just as I start to remember where they are). However, they don’t move the cartoon channels or they would have hell to pay from a 10 year old (me? I don’t care, I just write out a new list of where they are…it does seem that a couple of movie channels disapeared, but mmeeeeh, doesn’t matter…6 channels of bad movies is enough, didn’t need 8.
Allrighty then, I’m with Wolf and the Yangming cable buttheads. Same problems. But I’ve found the overall quality of all channels to have deteriorated as well…or as that just my televison going whack after a mere two years?
Chou
yes, but what can be done? is this one of those areas where internationalized componenets of taiwan’s community can help foster greater internationalism by acting/agitating for improvement?
i am on vacation in the PI. the cable is nice. specifically, there is one channel i would like to bring to light: the korean station “Arriang”. simply amazing stuff…they have a quiz show of young adults competing in teams answering trivia questions in a “college bowl” format in which everything is in english. if such was allowed to be aired in taiwan the taiwanese would simply be shamed at the conversational level of the taiwanese students. for better or worse, TV does form a large part of one’s window on the world. PI’s cable has at least five taiwan based stations and at least 2 CCTVs and the star asia (mandarin) cluster. you can easily count on a single amputated finger how many channels taiwan allots fot her immediate southern channel: 0.
PI has indigenous programming, korean, taiwan, china, dubai, india, states, europe, japanese. taiwan in comparison is a disgrace. it is hoped that someone with a bit of pull comes across this thread and realizes that taiwan’s feudal cable cabal is hampering the development of the people of taiwan.
All the channels are clear except 97 for me.
What’s on 97?
Good for thier word. The Yang Ming Cable Guy just stopped buy. He removed my splitter and reonnected the cable to my TV. Cleard up the CNN acne problem lickety Split. I felt so stupid. 
Wolf, and others, check your cables and any splittters that you might have attached to your line.
Chou
No matter how many times I flip channels, I can hardly ever find anything worth watching on the cable TV.
I’m still fuming that, after building up my expectations by showing live English Premiership football on Saturday evenings for a few weeks at the start of this season, they suddenly cut it off and replaced it with yet more deadly-dull local baseball/pool/whatever.
The cable TV here is definitely a national disgrace. I believe that the wannabe-international city of Taipei is the only metropolis in East Asia where BBC World is not available on the cable menu.
From what they told me Hallmark is gone from Taiwan as none of the cable operators renewed the contract, not sure if that’s true, but everywhere I’ve been no one seems to have it now. Some cable companies also cut contracts with Star World. Right before Chinese New Year I called a satellite operator that gave me the run down, but now I can’t find their pricing. It was something like 20k for the first year and 16k after that. This was for the best package and they have Hallmark and Star World, and a handful of other decent channels, all in all it was like 50 channels, but theres only about 10 that I like.
[quote=“BillyPete”]
As for Star World, it’s available on digital:
lsc.net.tw/news/event.html (200NT more a month). You also get a bunch of porn channels :shock:
Speaking of porn channels, most operators have a dedicated scrambled porn channel (channel 3?). You need a (black market?) descrambler box to descramble it, but does it remove the mosaic? Is that mosaic some censorship law here? Wonder if you get a clear view of all “3 points” on digital.[/quote]
This would be nice, but it’s useless for those people in the Taipei area. It only covers Taoyuan, Hsinchu, and Taichung. Anyone know a digital company in Taipei?
Yang Ming Cable up in Tienmu still offers hallmark. I know Just finished watcvhing sesame street in English with the kids.
Chou
[quote=“BillyPete”]
Speaking of porn channels, most operators have a dedicated scrambled porn channel (channel 3?). You need a (black market?) descrambler box to descramble it, but does it remove the mosaic? Is that mosaic some censorship law here? Wonder if you get a clear view of all “3 points” on digital.[/quote]
All you need to remove teh mosaic and get the picture ( all “3 points”) is to put a different type filter on the TV. The mosaic is actually at the end of the video block like teletext, and thus is actually just covering “all 3 points”. Its not really scrambling it
Under the bridge on Pao Chiao Road in Hsin Tien, a guy used to sell the “descrambler” for the porn channel
To remove the mosaic you would haev to build a filter yourself, else find one. I do not know where these are sold
To anyone who hasn’t heard it on the radio, ICRT is starting a petition to get Star World back. Go to icrt.com.tw, click on events, then ICRT events…don’t know if it’ll help but it’s worth a try. I’ve been to quite a few big cities in Asia, and Taipei has by far the worst selection of foreign programming. I mean, how many documentaries about African elephants can a person watch?!?
Yang Ming Cable up in Tianmu still offers hallmark. I know Just finished watcvhing sesame street in English with the kids.
Chou[/quote]
This is somewhat good news, at least someone can get it!
I still got Hallmark, but it’s lousy quality. Must be the reason why it’s on channel 104 or somewhere around there; some other ‘crap’ floating around there, too …
Aeh, you are not asking for some quality service here, are you?
Sorry for being sarcastic, but I don’t think providing a good service is in anyones agenda here as you can see from the picture quality (or the lack thereof) provided. I did remove the splitter and even changed my wall outlet, giving me a better picture but some channels won’t get much better since the feed is already poor.
That said the hardware would need to support dual language, not sure if TVs actually do (can’t figure it out since the labels on the remote and the OSD is in Chinese only).