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The Media

Streaming Satellite TV Service to Another Country? 35

Posted by Cliff from the 21st-century-programming dept.
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."
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Streaming Satellite TV Service to Another Country? More

Streaming Satellite TV Service to Another Country?

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  • Im pretty sure youre driving something bulldozer sized through the regulations. But It sounds like a nifty idea.
  • I've got a better idea. Don't watch so much TV, it will hurt your eyes (insert obvious Monty Python reference here).

    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.

    • I don't get this idea. Why is watching TV bad? Seriously... I like TV, and it seems the submitter does as well. I don't know how often I hear, "Oh, I don't watch any TV." in a condescending voice. What is it with people who don't like television looking down on those of us who enjoy it?
      • I dont watch any tv, not at the moment, theres never anything good on a sunday afternoon!
      • Nothing, really. Television doesn't have anything bad (unless you really don't like corporate brainwashing), it's just devoid of all the good things present in the alternatives. You could be going for a walk, talking to friends, even reading Slashdot. You're either thinking or doing more than you would be if you spent your time watching TV. Even most video games require you to use _some_ thought or improve your hand/eye coordination.
      • Well, there is nothing inherently wrong with TV. But it is certainly not so fabulous that I would go to this length just to be able to get my daily dose of undubbed "friends" in Singapore. And that was the point I was trying to make.

        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....

  • You could probably build a little sat dish that could sit inside your house, maybe in your roof, or near a window with curtains across it. That may get you a good enough signal.
  • Hmm... Well, it'll be LEGAL, but there's a difference between legal and legal in a fascist country... =P *Cough*US*Cough*Singapore*Cough* Anyway, it'll require loads of bandwidth... We're thinking about doing the opposite here, getting a stream of TV Tokyo... Also, finding a solution for controlling the receiver will most likely be hard. Why bother? The Cheap DVDs mentioned in another post seems to be a better option.
    • Hmm... Well, it'll be LEGAL, but there's a difference between legal and legal in a fascist country...

      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)

      by NoMoreNicksLeft ( 516230 )
      They have serial ports in the back.

      echo "command chars" > /dev/ttyS0

      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.
  • I hate to troll, but...

    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?
    • I pay 50$ canadian for a 3.5/800 DSL line. 800kbit (~640kbit after overhead) is more than enough to stream very good quality DivX realtime.

      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)

    by The Cydonian ( 603441 ) on Sunday September 29, 2002 @08:33AM (#4353240) Homepage Journal

    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].

  • But technically this will be a little difficult - you're probably going to end up compressing the crap out of the stream with the result that it will look awful - and in a country that censors the TV I'd be wary of stretching the law too far.

    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 really care about legalities but I think streaming satellite 24/7 wouldn't be viable or even necessary. Will you really be watching TV 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? If you were would you be satesfied with only one channel? How well will you be able to stream over a DSL line across an ocean? I run a mud, an online text based game, while we have a lot of players from overseas they find the connection hard and this is with a few hundred bytes of text per second.

    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.
  • Quite simple actually.

    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.


  • 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 to television? Life without satellite TV might be just what the doctor ordered.

  • 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.
  • I don't own a TV (by choice), yet I still get to watch the handful of shows that I like at most a week after they are released. Essentially, I have outsourced the satellite/DVR/encoding process to pirates and just download the stuff when it's done.

    I also have a lot of free time and get to read lots of books...

  • Possible solution (Score:3, Informative)

    by stevew ( 4845 ) on Sunday September 29, 2002 @03:49PM (#4354788) Journal
    First realities - as others have pointed out, you are going
    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. .5Mb/s might do
    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!

  • Why not just subscribe to a good USENET server? Most of the television programming that's of any value gets posted within 24 hours of broadcast anyway. That way you only have to be concerned with the download speed, and can save the cost of the satellite equipment, PC and upload link.

  • Bad Idea... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by duffbeer703 ( 177751 ) on Sunday September 29, 2002 @07:07PM (#4355668)
    Remember the incident a few years ago with the smart-ass kid who got caned? Smuggling the internet into Singapore is unlikely to be well received.

    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.
    • When that kid was caned for chewing gum or whatever "crime" he committed
      He was spray-painting cars IIRC. Serves him right. A great embassador he was.
  • P2P sharing networks carry alot television programs. If you look on Kazaa for the Simpsons for instance, you could probably find almost every episode. Doing it that way will decrease your cost for an Amwerican DSL line or costly recording equipment. The one drawback is that you can only get what the bootleggers watch....daily diet of Simpsons and Seinfeld most likely. in summary: let the booters do the work, and the P2P be your tv guide

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