We don’t really watch television – aside from the odd programme which we watch on Netflix, TV doesn’t really feature much for us. But we know that many of our readers who are resident on the island want to stay up to date with television from their home countries. It used to be relatively easy – you had a big satellite dish fitted, and got the appropriate box, and away you went. But in recent years, the satellite companies have moved their footprint and made it pretty much impossible to successfully view foreign television in that way.
The answer these days is to watch television online. There are any number of “free” services you can use to stream TV, but they have two big issues for most people:
1/ The software keeps changing, which means you have to keep updating the computer or Android box to continue watching. It’s not just a time sink, for some people it’s beyond their IT skills.
2/ The quality and reliability are poor. At the end of the day, the TV companies don’t “give” their signal away free of charge. So most of the “free” streams are illegal – they basically rely on someone taking a legal satellite feed and then uploading it to a server. If they suffer a power cut, or flaky internet, the stream pixelates or crashes. The end users suffer at best a poor image and buffering and at worst, lose the channel altogether.
