Streaming Satellite TV Service to Another Country?

streamViewer asks: "I'm planning to move in the near future from the US to Singapore where private satellite dish ownership is against forbidden and all television service is delivered by a state-owned monopoly. However, in this particular country, while English language television programming is limited and highly censored, Internet service is plentiful and for the most part unregulated To get around this problem, I'm considering installing a dish on a friend's house, paying for DSL service there and setting up a computer to allow me to both control the dish/receiver and to stream video to me in Asia. Video could either be real-time, or probably more realistic given the nature of overseas Net traffic, stored using a software-based DVR. What hardware/software solution would you envision for this task? Are you aware of anyone else doing this? Do you have any thoughts on which satellite services would have the most permissible licensing restrictions to allow me to do this? And finally, am I a fool to think this is really a loophole in their regulatory policy? Are there any other reasons why I shouldn't do this? Thanks in advance."

Comments

I don't get it. Television problems in Singapore?

[The Cydonian]

First things first. Singapore has a (Government-linked?) cable company that delivers satellite television and internet over cable. It also has a local English-language news channel, three primetime English channels (one of them being 24 hours), delivered by two media companies. In fact, I seem to be finding a lot of familiar names out there in those pages; do the names "Con Air", "Seinfield", "CSI", "Star Trek - Enterprise" and "Survivor" ring any bells?

And oh, if you are worried about censorship in Singapore, consider the webcast of a familiar news channel. Not all video content there is free of course, but heck, it's still $39.95 a year.

Now you were saying....?

Obligatory Warning:- SCV's crummy webpages are apparently designed to perform best in IE alone. I don't know if it's me, but the pages are rendering bad in Opera.

Possible solution

[stevew]

First realities - as others have pointed out, you are going
to have issues with your allowed upload speed. You need a symetric
DSL at the receiver end that can pump a decent rate
out. 128kbs probably isn't near sufficient. .5Mb/s might do
it. Once you've done that - here is a possible
technical solution for you.

So you load a Home Computer/TV package like the real
magic stuff, or ATI package that gives you TIVO like
features on your PC -then get an encrypted link running
between the two PC's... maybe a VPN connection. Finally
VNC comes to mind! This way you can control your screen
remotely and see the results somewhere else.

This seems like it at least has a chance to work, though
I expect the delivered bandwidth won't keep up. You're
going to see huge delays on packets and I expect you
won't be happy with the results. This might work okay
over a LAN, but I have my doubts about 10K miles away.

Good luck!

dude

[sydlexic]

clearly you are not up-to-speed on the criminal justice system in singapore.