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.