Streaming Satellite TV Service to Another Country? 35
streamViewer asks: "I'm planning to move in the near future from the US to Singapore where private satellite dish ownership is against forbidden and all television service is delivered by a state-owned monopoly. However, in this particular country, while English language television programming is limited and highly censored, Internet service is plentiful and for the most part unregulated To get around this problem, I'm considering installing a dish on a friend's house, paying for DSL service there and setting up a computer to allow me to both control the dish/receiver and to stream video to me in Asia. Video could either be real-time, or probably more realistic given the nature of overseas Net traffic, stored using a software-based DVR. What hardware/software solution would you envision for this task? Are you aware of anyone else doing this? Do you have any thoughts on which satellite services would have the most permissible licensing restrictions to allow me to do this? And finally, am I a fool to think this is really a loophole in their regulatory policy? Are there any other reasons why I shouldn't do this? Thanks in advance."
Loophole?!?! (Score:2)
All this just to watch TV... (Score:2, Insightful)
Or, as an alternative, you could try learning the language while you are there, and try to watch local TV instead.
And being an asian country, maybe you'll find an abundance of cheap DVD's there. That while surely give you more quality entertainment than the option of the usual stuff they send on TV.
And what's wrong with books? Newspapers? Magazines? Having a social life instead? IMHO you should be happy to have a reason to cut down on TV.
Re:All this just to watch TV... (Score:2)
Re:All this just to watch TV... (Score:2)
Re:All this just to watch TV... (Score:1)
Re:All this just to watch TV... (Score:2)
Sometimes I am amazed at the resources people put into their TV-viewing. They schedule their life around TV programs (personally, I have never been able to follow a series for more than two consecutive episodes). But hey, that's just me....
Build a stealth sat dish (Score:1)
Re:Build a stealth sat dish (Score:1)
dude (Score:3, Informative)
Ya (Score:1)
Re:Ya (Score:1)
If I'm not wrong, the The Infocomm Development Authority [ida.gov.sg] is the regulator for telecommunications in Singapore. Can't be bothered to check them out; this website as well (in addition to SCV's, as I pointed out in an earlier [slashdot.org] post) isn't seem to be rendering properly on Opera. Besides, my training isn't quite in law; I understand the issue might be civil liberties in a foreign (possibly fascist) country, but I'll let a more-abled person to comment on that.
I'm not sure if it's legal in the US though; could this attract the DMCA?
Re:Ya (Score:3, Insightful)
echo "command chars" >
usually works.
DirecTivo with a turbonet card is the best option, btw. Wouldn't need tivo service, either. Or for that matter, wouldn't need directv service, if he was willing to run a cam emulator.
Legally bypassing Singapore and US copyright law? (Score:2, Interesting)
You're asking us how to send over wire something that is illegal over the air from one of the world's most copyright-oppressive regimes to one of the world's most controlling ones? And you want to do this legally?
Not only that, you want to do this over an Asymetrical DSL line with at most 300k upstream? And you want to do this all for the sake of entertainment? (Obviously not news, or else you would be streaming from Europe)
Go to any "broadband enabled" website, watch a video. It looks like crap, doesn't it? Now remember that they are maximizing their upstream speed for sake of your connection. Cut that video screen down to 25% of its size, and that little postage stamp is what you can expect to be entertained by on your nights in a foreign country where you could be soaking up the culture and learning something, instead of just watching the television like an american.
Without going to a $300 symetrical DSL line, or a $600 T-1 line, The best you could hope for is to cut a divx file on their HD at a reasonable size, and have it saved to an FTP directory on their machine. Then you have to plan your viewing far in advance, and are therefore paying upwards of 100 dollars per month (plus the hardware costs divided by the time you will be in singapore) in order to watch maybe that one or two shows a week that you remember to pre-program. That's about 10 dollars per show. I hope its a really good show, because it will have to be to compare with the culturally beautiful landscape of singapore, and the rest of southern Asia, for that matter.
If it is sports you are after, I'm sure you can get them in bars. That at least would be a social atmosphere, where you would be soaking up something about the people. I'm not sure if Singapore has alcohol (I don't drink myself), but sporting simulcasts must exist.
For that matter, just have the PVR burn to a DVD, and send DVD's over. That would be much cheaper, and maybe you would get outside to pick up the mail.
Sorry, you had asked if this was a bad idea, and it is. Just not for the reasons you were looking for. And it's difficult to not come down on an American for being... one of us, but we keep giving ourselves a bad name for reasons like this.
My god man do you have any idea how interseting a trip to Singapore actually could be? How many people would gladly trade places with you? The people you could meet, the culture you could investigate? The high-schoolers you could interview, the newspaper articles you could write? For that matter, the photographs and other cultural artifacts you could send back home?
Now, if you were talking about streaming TV from Singapore back to the US, that might be something. But, (now that I've officially lost 3 Karma), do you see just how empty and hollow a goal bringing US TV with you to a foreign country is?
Re:Legally bypassing Singapore and US copyright la (Score:1)
I also can buy blocks of bandwidth, the biggest is 50GB for 50$ canadian.
I'd find out if an ISP like mine is offered where your friend lives, it would allow you to do what you want for (in my case) 100-200$ canadian a month. That's more than sattelite, sure, but still not insane (Especially depending how much you use it, since 100$ would get you a total of 65GB, which is lots of TV shows.)
Regards, Guspaz.
I don't get it. Television problems in Singapore? (Score:3, Informative)
First things first. Singapore [www.gov.sg] has a (Government-linked?) cable company [scv.com.sg] that delivers satellite television [scvmaxtv.com.sg] and internet [scv.com.sg] over cable. It also has a local English-language news channel [channelnewsasia.com], three primetime English channels (one of them being 24 hours), delivered by two [mediacorptv.com] media companies [sphmediaworks.com]. In fact, I seem to be finding a lot of familiar names out there in those pages; do the names "Con Air", "Seinfield", "CSI", "Star Trek - Enterprise" and "Survivor" ring any bells?
And oh, if you are worried about censorship in Singapore, consider the webcast of a familiar news channel [cnn.com]. Not all video content there is free of course, but heck, it's still $39.95 a year [real.com].
Now you were saying....?
Obligatory Warning:- SCV's crummy webpages are apparently designed to perform best in IE alone. I don't know if it's me, but the pages are rendering bad in Opera [opera.com].
Sorry to be another anti-TV person (Score:2)
So, why not consider switching most of your day-to-day entertainment to radio?
You can pick up all sorts of stuff with a good reciever, and combined with internet radio, I'm sure you can find all sorts of things.
Combine this with occasional DVDs in the mail of the stuff you don't want to miss. After all, what proportion of modern TV isn't crap?
Spend tomorrow making notes of everything you watch on TV and work out how much of it you can live without. I think you might be surprised at the numbers.
I don't think streaming is viable (Score:1)
What would probably be a better idea would be to schedule the programs you really want to capture and translate those to an mpeg or avi. Then rather than streaming them ftp or scp them over with a cron job. If you'll be living in Singapore there's a huge time zone difference anyway, so a live streaming show might not be at a convenient time.
You could do this with a video for linux supported capture card and a tiny bit of software.
Get a Tivo (Score:2)
Get a Tivo [tivo.com] and install a Tivonet [9thtee.com] Install TivoWeb [lightn.org] so you can programm the Tivo via the internet, and locate some video extractions software.
Don't get a Tivo Satellite combo, get a standalone unit so you can tell it to record in low quality (VHS quality), an hour of video is about a gigabyte.
Download the video over the net, or have your buddy burn them onto CD and mail them to you.
dsl? (Score:2)
The DSL at your freind's house might be 1.5+ mbps downstream, but he'll be using the upstream side to send you video, which is typically much smaller (somewhere in the 128-384kbps range) - I don't remember offhand how many kilobits it takes to transmit a broadcast-quality mpeg at TV resolution, but I bet you're cutting it close.
Are you really that addicted? (Score:1)
Don't support repressive governments. (Score:2)
How can you consider living in a country that violates human rights so flagrantly? So, they have relatively open net acess, an inconsistancy. But forbidding satellite dishes or free communication between the citizens (eg: one state run monopoly on broadcasting) is unacceptable. I recommend that you boycott this country, or if you cannot (because of a job or whatever) when you leave write to their dictator for life (that's what singapore has, right?) and tell him that he may be benevolent, but you won't be doing business with singapore in the future.
In answer to your question, you'd need a dedicated person on this end and a lot of bandwidth-- even with good compression shows are still very big.
It could work for a couple shows every once and awhile, but not for a big feed, I don't think.
While its true that the US government also immorally profits from the US airwaves, only letting a few cronies use them, at least we allow people who provide a genuinely better alternative to survive- in this case direct broadcast satellite television.
edonkey P2P (Score:2)
I also have a lot of free time and get to read lots of books...
Possible solution (Score:3, Informative)
to have issues with your allowed upload speed. You need a symetric
DSL at the receiver end that can pump a decent rate
out. 128kbs probably isn't near sufficient.
it. Once you've done that - here is a possible
technical solution for you.
So you load a Home Computer/TV package like the real
magic stuff, or ATI package that gives you TIVO like
features on your PC -then get an encrypted link running
between the two PC's... maybe a VPN connection. Finally
VNC comes to mind! This way you can control your screen
remotely and see the results somewhere else.
This seems like it at least has a chance to work, though
I expect the delivered bandwidth won't keep up. You're
going to see huge delays on packets and I expect you
won't be happy with the results. This might work okay
over a LAN, but I have my doubts about 10K miles away.
Good luck!
USENET (Score:2)
Bad Idea... (Score:3, Insightful)
While you may be able to tunnel some sort of encrypted VPN solution via DSL, I'm sure the authorities and/or network folks at the ISP will notice the massive amounts of encrypted traffic heading into your computer.
When that kid was caned for chewing gum or whatever "crime" he committed, the US Dep't of State was unable to do anything. So when you are facing years in an asian prison for importing Western TV, you'll be safe to assume nobdoy in the US is going to help you.
If a company is sending you to Singapore, ask for a hardship-tour pay differential or do not go at all. Otherwise, go somewhere else or learn to do what you are told in foreign lands.
Re:Bad Idea... (Score:2)
P2P cheap, free, andplays in the legal grey matter (Score:1)