Recommended TV Options

[sirtrevor]

Hi all

Moving to new house in a couple of months and thinking about my TV setup.

My main priorities are Premier League football and Thai TV for wifey, History channel and Nat Geo would be nice, although not essential.

I am thinking about CTH satellite or some kind of IPTV setup. I have looked at the Thai IPTV website and it seems to cater for what I want, but how is the reliability?

We'll probably have about 10mb Internet, but HD quality for the football is very important for me, so I'm probably leaning towards satellite. But I would like to hear from anyone with some firsthand experience.

Thanks in advance.

[avander]

I have gone Sophon and IPTV. I have a 20mb fibre connection through TOT and it is pretty flakey atm getting much lower speeds. I will see how it goes over the next 2 weeks and may call them back if it doesn't improve. I changed my router to a 320mbps over the original 150mbps too. I am downloading torrents most of what I want watch but planning and thinking of a ROKU 3 for IPTV. You can get around the geo-blocking with products such as HULA (FREE) but not sure what you need for the ROKU yet.

Sophon is mainly for my wife but it does have have English language channel's to. Best of all it seems to be very inexpensive. All in all Sophon and Torrents to start with.

[avander]

I have gone Sophon and torrents to begin with. I have a 20mb fibre connection through TOT and it is pretty flakey atm getting much lower speeds? I will see how it goes over the next 2 weeks and may call them back if it doesn't improve. I changed my router to a 320mbps over the original 150mbps too. HD seems ok at the normal rates.

I am also downloading torrents for most of what I want watch but thinking of a ROKU 3 for IPTV. You can get around the geo-blocking with products such as HULA (FREE) for PC but not sure what you need for the ROKU yet.

Sophon is mainly for my wife but it does have have English language channel's to. Best of all it seems to be very inexpensive. All in all Sophon and Torrents to start with.

[sirtrevor]

Like you, I download a lot of torrents for movies, British Tv etc... Can you watch English Premier League on Sophon?

EDIT after doing a search I see Sophon is a cable company in Pattaya. I don't live there, so not an option for me. Do you watch English Premier League on IPTV and is the coverage any good?

Edited January 10, 2014 by sirtrevor

[avander]

Like you, I download a lot of torrents for movies, British Tv etc... Can you watch English Premier League on Sophon?

EDIT after doing a search I see Sophon is a cable company in Pattaya. I don't live there, so not an option for me. Do you watch English Premier League on IPTV and is the coverage any good?

No sorry, not into EPL or a lot of sport for that matter.

At the moment I am watching stuff from my library; 100's of hours of Movies and TV Series I started downloading about 18 months ago but never had time to watch until I moved here in September. Still not a lot of time but watching a bit of the stuff I downloaded.

Recently I tried Crackle IPTV from the U.S. and watched a couple of movies online. Not too bad although we have a lot of wireless users in the house and that takes a toll on the bandwidth. Still had a bit of lag and buffering going on but not too bad on our connection when it was working at the rated 20mbps.

I am doing all this piecemeal as I have been fitting out my property and as the cabling and other stuff becomes ready I am slowly starting to use it. Next I am getting furniture for my HT system and when that's ready I will get the whole thing going. At that point I may buy the Roku unit but will wait to see if I really need it. I may yet just stick with Sophon and Torrent downloads.

CTH currently has EPL covered but no guarantees on how long. We were going to go that way but it seemed too expensive compared to Sophon which certainly has what my wife wants and looks like it may have enough stuff for me also.

Good luck with your assessment. Don't forget to post back what you end up doing.

[sirtrevor]

Thanks for your info.

[manarak]

interesting thread, I will be following...

in any case, forget about IPTV, at least for content that is not hosted in Thailand.

The speed is not nearly sufficient for watching TV, and I don't talk about higher definitions of 720p or full HD 1080p...

[DogNo1]

Not sure what speeds you can get from your provider but over here the Linksys (Belkin) 900 is the new normal. With it you can get 450 and if you use wireless, 450/450. In other words 450 on both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz channels. They add them together to get the name of the router: The Linksys 900.

[sirtrevor]

Thanks for the replies so far. I've found Richard Barrow's blog very useful in finding out about the options. I'm sure it's been posted before, but I'll include the links that i found useful. Maybe someone else will, too.

http://www.richardbarrow.com/category/television/

http://www.richardbarrow.com/2013/06/how-to-watch-english-premiere-league-in-thailand/

It looks like i'll probably go down the CTH route, with a grammy box for the World Cup. I'll inverst in an Android stick and test the IPTV options before committing to that one I think.

Cheers.

[SantiSuk]

CTH is excellent value, though not without its quibbles.

Plus side.

All matches are shown live and in HD with Sky's English language commentary. The quality of the HD is excellent. The Stadium 7 Channel has the official Premier League English magazine programmes: one hour and two hour reprises of the weekend matches every Sunday to Wednesday - the two hour jobby gives 10 to 15 minutes of highlights to a couple of the best games and tapers down to goals only of the boring ones; one hour Premier League Update - a daily magazine programme giving latest transfer, rumours, injury and spotlights - moderately interesting if you are a real enthusiast. Other worthwhile english language channels: Sky News HD, Channel News Asia, Fox Sports plus HD, Fox Action Movies HD, Nat Geo Music HD, Australia Network; those are just my particular favourites, but there are a couple of handfuls more if you like US series, older movies, reality TV, Nat Geo programmes etc.

Negatives. Replays of EPL games can be difficult to locate and are much less frequent than under Trues regime. The on-screen programme guide is pure carp and the web-site is clunky. Takes perseverance to find the time for and the right time of showing for a favoured team's replay. CTH are new to this game and admin in the firts year has been atrocious. Expect not to be billed or billed multiple times!

Reception can be slightly dicky - periods when it is a bit juddery and can go dead for 5-10 secs, those being in addition to the usual reception outages (which I think are slightly less frequent that they were with True)

CTH has the franchise for this season and two (three?) more. Looks like they are over the hump. You should be safe taking a one year contract to reduce your monthly cost by 15% ish. Stick to monthly if you are a glass half empty kind of fella (like Avander, when it comes to CTH)

Finally - note that CTH will not bring you Champions League matches (True Visions Gold or Platinum package), nor FA Cup or League Cup (some coverage on Thai public broadcasting).

[sirtrevor]

Cheers - all good stuff.

[sirtrevor]

Finally - note that CTH will not bring you Champions League matches (True Visions Gold or Platinum package), nor FA Cup or League Cup (some coverage on Thai public broadcasting).

I'm a West Ham fan, so Champions League not so important. And given our recent performances in cup competitions...