New Problems with American Television in the Philippines

Here in the Philippines, if you have cable TV there are many American television shows available, but many are old reruns. I think CNN, BBC, and Sports are the only current shows you get.

You will also see the same programs playing on different channels.  With all the shows available, it does get frustrating when you see the same show over and over.

To combat this problem and to see shows I miss from the US, I would download torrent files of the shows I like. Torrent files, also known as bit torrent, are a way for many internet users to download or upload files to be shared. This is what known as P2P or Peer to Peer sharing.

To upload or download available files you need two things. First is a Torrent Client program. I use Vuze but there are many others available. Some of these include Bittorent, Bitcomet, microtorrent and others. The second thing you need is to download a torrent file. This is a file that tells the program what file you want to download. Once you add that torrent file into the program, the program will look for available computers over the net that has that file to share. A computer sharing the file is called a “seed” and the computers getting the file are called a “leach”.

This does take a lot of time to download depending on how many are seeding the file you want to download. However, the program runs in the background and I usually download over night when I do not need to use the internet because the downloading takes up much of the internet resources.

There is music, movies, TV shows and EBooks available on the net to download. Now here is the problem. TV stations make their income from the commercials targeted for their local audience, music produces and book publishers make theirs from sales.  Many of these torrent files are breaking the copy write laws.

The website I used to get my Torrent files and downloads was Mininova.com. This was a site with thousands or maybe millions of files to download. The company is located in the Netherlands and recently was sued for hosting all this content.  Because of this, I have to look for other places to find the downloads I want.

Another thing I have tried, but was not successful was to be able to watch some TV shows from the TV networks that have the shows available on their website. Unfortunately, because of the need to make money by advertising, these network sites are blocked to users outside of their areas of broadcast.  I have tired finding a proxy server to be able to watch these shows but have not been able to find one and get the streaming video.

If you do not know what I mean by a proxy server, let me explain. First, let me explain how they know where you are located.   Some websites have what is called a “sniffer” program checking the location of the computer accessing their website. These sniffer programs look at your IP address to see your location. All computers accessing the internet have an IP (Internet Protocol) this number is your unique address on the internet. Each IP address is coded with information that shows where the user is located and who their provider is.

A proxy server are sites you connect to and from there go to a site that is blocked by your IP address. There are free proxy servers and others you can pay to use.  Because I am cheap and not sure, it will work after paying, I have been trying the free ones. I am able to connect to the TV network site, but have not been able to get the streaming video.

If anyone has a solution to the proxy situation, the readers and I would like to know.