I watched The Price is Right over lunch (chicken rice, 2 dollars) today. I had no idea that Drew Carey is hosting the show these days. I also have no idea what stuff costs (especially American cars, of which there were plenty in this episode).

After many years without a television set in Japan, I am slowly getting reacquainted with the medium. Which, of course, is probably not a good thing. But so far, I believe the situation is under control.

In addition to the TV itself (came with the house), we have rented a cable box and subscribed to couple of channels. Cissy wanted to have NHK in order not to forget her Japanese, so we have that (NHK World Premium, to be exact). But you cannot subscribe to just a single channel, you have to have at least three basic groups, which in our case are World News (BBC World News, Bloomberg, CCTV-9, CNBC, CNN), Education (Animal Planet, BBC Knowledge, Discovery Channel, Discovery Travel, HISTORY, National Geographic), and Chinese Entertainment (for Cissy's mother). In addition to those there are about half a dozen free local channels that you can also get over the air, and the complimentary Arirang, Australia Network, Deutsche Welle, KBS World, and TVRI. As a clever marketing ploy, they gave us access to all channels for the first three days, in the hopes that we would get addicted to HBO or the Cricket Channel.

The biggest change from how I remember TV can be summed up in three consonants: DVR. The cable box contains basic hard disk recording functionality, so that rather than watching anything live, you get to pick from this week's programme guide what you would like to see, and it records it for you. This way you can quickly build up quite a library. If you do watch something live, you can pause and replay it. There is also video-on-demand, but the choices are rather limited. So while it does not integrate with YouTube, Hulu or iTunes, this is already quite transformative.

The cable box also provides our Internet connection, which is not as great as it was in Tokyo, but workable (my Skype conference calls and screen sharing sessions with Japan work fine). Streaming video is not much fun, I am not sure if that is a bandwidth cap with the modem, or because of the overseas connection. It could supply a free home phone line as well (free local calls incoming and outgoing), but the activation fee and the price for the telephone itself cannot compete with our mobile phones for a short-term stay.