57 Channels (And Nothin' On)

I am moving into my permanent place on Monday and will likely be without TV. My intent is to live off internet based media and just connect my laptop up to the TV since it has HDMI out, not that my TV will be here before August. I get a lot of questions about, "What is TV like in Taiwan?" and it actually IS an interesting question, or interesting response.

I have cable TV including about 100 channels in my current place. I'm not sure if I have the "foreigner package" or anything like that but I'll starting with English language TV, I get CNN, BBC, HBO, Discovery (sometimes dubbed in Chinese), Nat Geo (sometimes dubbed in Chinese), and several mediocre American movie channels, like "Hollywood". I haven't watched much beyond CNN and BBC and have come to the conclusion that there really is only 20 minutes of marketable news on any given day. BBC is just as bad as CNN in running the same stuff over and over. And it's not even the Headline News version, has our collective attention span gotten that short?

So on to Taiwanese TV. The great thing is it is very predictable which means I can get great bog material any time of day. The following programming is available 24/7. I kid you not, I just took all of these snapshots in sequence and I knew I would get each and every one of them.

1. Baseball - Baseball in on all the time. I couldn't get Yankee baseball back home through Dish Network nor MLB.com because of blackout restrictions and Steinbrenner family vendettas but I can always get the Yanks here. Live on up to 3 stations and replayed throughout the day. You can also get local Taiwanese pros, aka CPBL (See my previous post on Tian Mu Stadium). They also show the Dodgers and Red Sox quite frequently.

2. Annoying women selling stuff - It usually revolves around skin whitening cream or some weight loss supplement or non-cardio fitness type thing, like that vibrating band that shakes your whole body into weight loss. No joke.

3. Puppet Shows - I can't tell you how many attempts with a cell phone camera it took for me to get this shot as the puppet shows are all about crazy fight scenes which resulted in a pink and purple blur. Think Final Fantasy but with puppets.

4. Monk TV - Not the OCD detective, Buddhist monk TV. At least 5 channels at once. They all look like they are filmed in someone's basement. Think Wayne's World, but with monks.

5. Stock Market TV - There are always at least 4 or 5 financial channels and they all involve some printout of box plots with hand written notes and a guy holding a pointer. It really is that cheezy. For a society that is supposedly so high tech, there are a lot of anomalies. 

6. Cartoons - There are several adult-ish oriented cartoon channels and even a Chinese Cartoon Network with Japanimation. You can also catch Sponge Bob dubbed in Chinese and subbed in Japanese. As you can see in the photo, Sponge Bob himself is not subbed because he's always too stoned to say anything intelligible.

7. Corny soap operas with crying dudes - this comprise about 20 channels at all times of day.

OK, so there was one thing that is not on all the time. I only saw it once and scrambled to grab the camera:

Japanese Women Wrestling - This is not like the women's wrestling that I grew up with nor any Chyna like nonsense. These women are nuts, extremely athletic and brutal. In this pictured move she grabbed the other by the legs and spun here around like a helicopter about 10 times, getting faster each time and then just let go and hurled her like a rag doll. Insane!

In my plan to get TV/movie entertainment there is a big hurdle:

Most legit web based video content restricts access to those in the United States. I'm not sure if Guam gets in on the action but Taiwan can't access Hulu, Netflix or even Scrabble on Facebook. There is a loophole: you can log in to a proxy service which will route you through a U.S. server to make it look like you are in the States. I was using a free (advertising based) service that worked for a few days but Hulu just caught up with them.

There are pay services which are supposed to be better and stay one step ahead technologically against Hulu. I may give that a shot once settled in; I wonder if it will work. I'm willing to pay Netflix and just use the video on demand service rather than pirate movies but that is also restricted to those that can convince the Netflix servers that they are in the U.S. There is so much other stuff to do here, I'm hoping to divorce my TV. I always liked this T-shirt: