Television in Trinidad

One of my ongoing complaints about the arrangement here is that I have no cable television. Given that I have no antennas either, I have no over the air television either. (A situation I plan on rectifying at my local Radio Shack.) I have four large screen televisions and no signals. But despair not for your humble narrator. Where there's a will... I have a couple of alternatives that I've been using.

DVDs of Questionable Legality

Actually there is nothing questionable about it. They are illegal.

Port of Spain has something of a culture of tolerance toward dvd piracy. There are at least three places that selling copies of movies some of which aren't out of the theaters yet. Most are street vendors but at least one has a full blown store front. And the DVDs? Note the high quality of the cover art. A closer inspection shows that they are really copies of the theater posters. They accomplish the job... sort of. At least one of those contains a different DVD than the cover shows.

The DVDs themselves are simply bulk DVDs. The street vendor thoughtfully wrote the name of the movie on the DVD by hand. The storefront ones are simply blank. The quality is mixed but at the price, about $1.50 each, no one is too concerned.

Live TV on the Internet

My other source of television is the internet and a couple sites in particular.

Buba's TV Shack

Buba's has a wide variety of links to most of the typical American and a large number of British cable television channels. They have a couple of BBC and ITV channels. As you might expect, the quality is not great but it is watchable. There is a pause at the beginning for an advertisement but sometimes, as with ESPN, there are no commercials. It is difficult, at best, to figure out what is going to be on ahead of time and the delay is not conducive to channel surfing.

Now Watch TV Live

This website is based out of India and has a huge number of Indian and Pakistani channels in addition to most of the American and British channels. For those who care, there is also a Polish channel. Here is full screen mode from ESPN from this website.

Not great but watchable. I'm not sure I'm missing much by not having ready access to the Port of Spain channels. The primary thing I watched on them was cricket until it was clear that if I continued to watch, I would have problems retaining my will to live.