How to watch entertainment from back home when living abroad
Living in another country can be an exhilarating thing, and until you are actually positioned in your new country you might think you’ll be happy to leave everything about your home behind. In reality, you won’t. Or you might be considering a move abroad and you are already worried about how you’ll keep up with the entertainment you are so fond of. Well, there’s good news ahead, at least for most people.
Having lived on the road for a few years in many different parts of the world I’ve had a chance to get to know many permanent expats and see how they conduct their normal lives. The vast majority still like to follow at least a few TV shows from back home, if not live sporting events and the latest movies as well. Fortunately, as long as you have a pretty good internet connection, the sky’s the limit.
It’s going to be a bit different everywhere, but for the most part here are how things work for the main categories:
Current feature films
Before piracy became a big issue (and we’ll cover that below), the Hollywood movie studios would typically open films in the US and Canada on one Friday, and then a month or two later they’d open in Europe (allowing the stars time to go on all the chat shows there in the days before the premiere), and then in the rest of the world in the months following that.
Now, largely because piracy is so rampant, the movie studios release films around the world on the same day, which they call “day and date.” This means that in many cases those living in Hong Kong will be able to see a movie about 12 hours before anyone in New York City has a chance. In other words, for many movies expats will actually have a shot at them first. This is more true of action films and big-budget dramas as opposed to comedies, which usually don’t translate all that well so they are often not even released in foreign-language markets. And of course, movie tickets will generally be quite cheap in countries where wages are typically low.
Current television shows and live sports
In most countries an expat will have a choice of some extended cable or satellite service, and often these will include specialty TV channels that actually show American and British TV shows the same week they are broadcast in their home country. For example, though most of Asia there’s a channel called Star World (owned by Sony) that shows American Idol and many other top American shows the day after they air back home. Actually, it’s more like 10 hours after they air back home due to the time difference.
In almost all countries you’ll also have many movie channels to choose from. Sometimes they are in a paid tier to your cable service but not always. In countries without a strong international language (unlike Spanish speaking or French speaking countries), the movies are often shown in English with subtitles, so you’ll have plenty of choices.
For live sports you’ll usually get a lot of free channels that are showing previously played football/soccer games or maybe bicycle racing. But you’ll sometimes get ESPN channels or others that show live American or British sports. They’ll often be part of a paid tier of sports channels, costing perhaps US$10 per month for all of them. If you are an avid sports fan then this will seem cheap since there are no other good choices.
Live sports or streaming services through a VPN or proxy service
As long as you have enough internet bandwidth then it’ll be possible to get almost anything streaming into your home computer, including services such as Netflix. The problem is that you’ll either need a “proxy” service or a VPN (virtual private network) to do it. In both cases it’s like an extra connection between your computer and another country, and then out to the internet from there.
There are free proxy services that are notoriously unreliable or filled with spam, but if you pay for one you might get good enough service for what you want. A VPN will always cost extra money, usually more than a proxy, and even then the speed will often be reduced down to the point that it’s hardly worth it at any price. For some specialized uses, or if your company is already paying for a good VPN, these can work okay, but they don’t seem to be nearly as popular as you might think. The main reason these aren’t too popular is that the method below is definitely the way most people choose to do it.
TV shows, movies, music, and whatever else, by bittorrent
First off, it’s true that downloading free (and commercial-free) TV shows and such using bittorrent is somewhere between illegal and unethical, but things are a bit different when you are living abroad. Someone using this system in the US is doing it purely to save money (while cheating content creators and advertisers out of their investment), but if you are living outside the US then most things will be inaccessible at any price.
Downloading things from bittorrent is simply the only way to ever see them at all. Due to territories and licensing agreements plus the economics of showing foreign TV shows on specialized channels, it’s either download free by bittorrent or miss things altogether. If there were, say, a global iTunes where TV shows were available for US$1 or $2 each then it would be different, but no such global system exists. In other words, it’s much easier to dismiss the moral issues of downloading “pirated” content when you have no legal alternatives.
And if you are willing and able to do it, the great news is that the global torrent community is thriving. Almost any TV show in the US, Canada, or the UK will be available online (with commercials edited out) within 5 hours or so of when it first aired. For those of us living in Asia the ritual is that we wake up, download the US or European shows we like that just finished airing a few hours ago, and that same evening we watch them ourselves.
Of course you can (controversially) also get pretty much any movie that’s been released on DVD (and some that are still in theaters) as well as any CD that’s ever been released on bittorrent as well. But again, it’s a weird situation in that once you get out of Europe (or Japan or Australia etc) the options are bittorrent or bootleg DVDs and CDs bought on the street. In the latter case, the creators get no money anyway, and you are actually paying to encourage piracy, so again bittorrent is a bit easier to defend.
Thankfully, the hassle of it keeps us watching less
When I lived in the US and had 100 or more TV stations in a language I knew it was often tempting to just flip the channels until I found something acceptable. Maybe it was a Mythbusters marathon or maybe it was the last two-thirds of a favorite movie, but in any case it was easy.
Living in a place where these options aren’t available means that consuming TV and movies requires jumping through a few hoops, and as a result I tend to watch maybe 10 total shows a week, all of which I like a lot. I believe that TV in particular gets unfairly criticized as a time-waster from many people, but I’ll also admit that not having the ability to watch marginal programming isn’t really a hardship.
Those of us with fast internet connections have almost limitless options, so we have to be thankful for that. In some places the internet is so slow or hard to get that downloading even one TV show is too much work.