American Tv In Thailand Via Satellite/cable

[damian5000]

I've got a friend considering moving over from America and one of his questions to me is what type of American TV is available in Chiang Mai.

Not just English speaking, but actual channels from America. He's a big fan of boxing, so HBO/Showtime in particular. Telemundo / Telefutura? Pay-per-view available? Or anything else people can think of that I haven't mentioned here. Thanks!

[Ulysses G.]

No American channels except maybe on the computer. I don't think that HBO is the same here - it's mostly movies.

TRUE seems to have most of the popular shows like Prison Break, Lost, the Supranos, Heroes, 24, etc., but it is not cheap.

Edited February 9, 2008 by Ulysses G.

[CobraSnakeNecktie]

I've got a friend considering moving over from America and one of his questions to me is what type of American TV is available in Chiang Mai.

Not just English speaking, but actual channels from America. He's a big fan of boxing, so HBO/Showtime in particular. Telemundo / Telefutura? Pay-per-view available? Or anything else people can think of that I haven't mentioned here. Thanks!

As UG said True UBC Sat TV has a lot of english US content shows but the HBO, Showtime and even CNN is Asian version..

ubctv.com --- to check out the selection and prices.

Many of the syndicated shows are not the latest season. Some are current like Survivor but most are not. Your best bet is to get a fast internet connection and download the movies and sporting events your after. It takes some hunting and skill to find the downloads but very doable. I get most of what I want on the net.

A lot of the networks like NBC, FOX have free downloads but they are restricted to US only and tricky to fake out their servers... Its often easier to find the shows on some sort of free download server.

Unfortunately the torrent method of downloading is problematic due to Thai ISP blocking and the general anemic state of Thailands 3rd world internet infrastructure.

Hope that helps

[gnode]

I've got a friend considering moving over from America and one of his questions to me is what type of American TV is available in Chiang Mai.

Not just English speaking, but actual channels from America. He's a big fan of boxing, so HBO/Showtime in particular. Telemundo / Telefutura? Pay-per-view available? Or anything else people can think of that I haven't mentioned here. Thanks!

As UG said True UBC Sat TV has a lot of english US content shows but the HBO, Showtime and even CNN is Asian version..

ubctv.com --- to check out the selection and prices.

Many of the syndicated shows are not the latest season. Some are current like Survivor but most are not. Your best bet is to get a fast internet connection and download the movies and sporting events your after. It takes some hunting and skill to find the downloads but very doable. I get most of what I want on the net.

A lot of the networks like NBC, FOX have free downloads but they are restricted to US only and tricky to fake out their servers... Its often easier to find the shows on some sort of free download server.

Unfortunately the torrent method of downloading is problematic due to Thai ISP blocking and the general anemic state of Thailands 3rd world internet infrastructure.

Hope that helps

Hmm... if you can't stream directly from NBC or FOX, and you can't use bit torrent, how else do you locate TV shows like Prison Break, 24, etc? Does the eDonkey/ed2k network work there, or is all peer-to-peer blocked or otherwise impractical in LOS? Is FTP the only viable option?

[Rasseru]

If your internet is strong, then you can use the tvu player(Google it) It streams a wide variety of American programs.

Was intrigued and checked it out, but found you can use the TVU Player only with Windows PCs. Know of anything like it you can use on a Mac?

[CobraSnakeNecktie]

Hmm... if you can't stream directly from NBC or FOX, and you can't use bit torrent, how else do you locate TV shows like Prison Break, 24, etc? Does the eDonkey/ed2k network work there, or is all peer-to-peer blocked or otherwise impractical in LOS? Is FTP the only viable option?

There are a lot of sites like free-tv-video-online.info for series. You just use your browser's http protocol.

That's just the tip of the iceberg. There are many sites and you can google around. You can pretty much find any show or movie with a little diligence. You can either stream the content or just download it.. Not hard at all.

[CobraSnakeNecktie]

If your internet is strong, then you can use the tvu player(Google it) It streams a wide variety of American programs.

Was intrigued and checked it out, but found you can use the TVU Player only with Windows PCs. Know of anything like it you can use on a Mac?

Rasseru.. if you run parallels with XP or Vista on your Mac then TVU works decently but not that satisfying if your internet speed is dodgy as it can stop and start. The upside is that you can get specific US channels and watch all the local news and commercials etc.

For me I sometimes use it when the international bandwidth is good but other times I just quit the TVU before it drives me crazy.. Unfortunately with TVU you cannot tweak the buffering to compensate for Thailand internet.

If you don't have parallels already then you can download and get a 30 day free trial key

[Rasseru]

If your internet is strong, then you can use the tvu player(Google it) It streams a wide variety of American programs.

Was intrigued and checked it out, but found you can use the TVU Player only with Windows PCs. Know of anything like it you can use on a Mac?

Rasseru.. if you run parallels with XP or Vista on your Mac then TVU works decently . . . . .

If you don't have parallels already then you can download and get a 30 day free trial key

Thanks, CSN. Never heard of parallels, but I'll google to learn more.

[infernalman7]

There's something called Bittorrent. You can get whatever you want on it.

[CobraSnakeNecktie]

There's something called Bittorrent. You can get whatever you want on it.

yeah except most Thai ISP's block or throttle Peer to Peer networking .. Just not the best option time wise to download content at the moment.

Infernal .. do you download movies etc via Bittorrent? what kind of performance do you get? which ISP?

[jaideeguy]

I subscribe to a newsgroup called 'easynews' and it provides me with downloads of tv shows aired less than 12 hrs old in HD and i keep up with all my favorite shows that are usually posted a few hours after aired. Movies ripped from DVD on archive, often before they play in BKK theaters and great archives of 'older classic tv series and movies. Altho i have satelite reception the same as ubc/true, my primary entertainment source is easynews and at $10/20gig/mo, it's much much cheaper than the big Ubc. fast downloads too.

EasyNews ®Easynews knows that you have many Usenet servers to choose from when you connect to Usenet. However, Easynews has become the #1 Usenet server of choice ...

www.easynews.com/

[wjmark]

I use uTorrent on TOT and regularly get full bandwidth downloads - 103k/sec (1 meg dsl line).

[triplegee]

There's something called Bittorrent. You can get whatever you want on it.

yeah except most Thai ISP's block or throttle Peer to Peer networking .. Just not the best option time wise to download content at the moment.

Infernal .. do you download movies etc via Bittorrent? what kind of performance do you get? which ISP?

I use BT 24/7 with a True 2.5Mb ADSL account - I max it out at 256kBs most of the time. Download your torrents from Thai sites and you're not relying on international bandwidth as they are mostly hosted in Thailand. For TV shows from international torrent sites I also generally get excellent download speeds as there is normally 1000's of peers / seeds.

Edited February 11, 2008 by triplegee

[tigerbeer]

There's something called Bittorrent. You can get whatever you want on it.

yeah except most Thai ISP's block or throttle Peer to Peer networking .. Just not the best option time wise to download content at the moment.

Infernal .. do you download movies etc via Bittorrent? what kind of performance do you get? which ISP?

I use BT 24/7 with a True 2.5Mb ADSL account - I max it out at 256kBs most of the time. Download your torrents from Thai sites and you're not relying on international bandwidth as they are mostly hosted in Thailand. For TV shows I generally also get excellent download speeds as there is normally 1000's of peers / seeds.

which thai torrent sites do you know of triplegee?

[pluto_manibo]

I've got a friend considering moving over from America and one of his questions to me is what type of American TV is available in Chiang Mai.

Not just English speaking, but actual channels from America. He's a big fan of boxing, so HBO/Showtime in particular. Telemundo / Telefutura? Pay-per-view available? Or anything else people can think of that I haven't mentioned here. Thanks!

HBO, Cinemax are based out of Hong Kong so will be slightly different from the American version. You also have Cnn, Cnbc and many sports channels on the TrueVisions satellite network....they also offer pay per view options as well as many other channels. Check out the website for a full listing.

[mogoso]

What about a slingbox cost about 150 or less, attaches to someones in the US tv and computer and you can watch in real time what they get on their cable on your computer. I think if the change the channel the slingbox is onyou watch what they then watch. I don't know if you can put it on a little used tv and do what you want to. We have 4 tv's between two people at our house and the family room one rarely is watched.

You must have a friend with cable that is in the same situation.

[Jingthing]

What about a slingbox cost about 150 or less, attaches to someones in the US tv and computer and you can watch in real time what they get on their cable on your computer. I think if the change the channel the slingbox is onyou watch what they then watch. I don't know if you can put it on a little used tv and do what you want to. We have 4 tv's between two people at our house and the family room one rarely is watched.

You must have a friend with cable that is in the same situation.

I suggest if you do this that you pay for your own dedicated DVR, then you aren't stuck with watching live. A huge difference! Also with the AV Slingbox you can hook up a DVD player perhaps get a Netflix account (with your host's help). Warning, physical resets on the host machines, slingbox, DVR, even their router are often required, and there is no way control that from Thailand.

[wjmark]

I use a 'remote desktop' program (realVNC) to control my computer in Canada. The computer has a TV card - hooked up to my mum's cable, and the computer itself is hooked up to my mum's dsl.

I can set it to record anything on my mum's cable system. Then I have the computer compress the file, and after, I use a ftp program to download it to LOS...

Not streaming video, but easy easy. Been using it for 2 years now. Hardest thing was setting up the 'port-forwarding' on the router...

One still needs equipment back home, but at least one can control what they need.

Also I upload stuff and use that computer to backup and store files from here in Thailand