Too many HN links point to items behind paywalls... That said, its all what you're used to. I've lived for nearly 30 years in odd corners of East and South Eas

Too many HN links point to items behind paywalls... That said, its all what you're used to. I've lived for nearly 30 years in odd corners of East and South East Asia and most of that time I had no access to cable or satellite, or the content that was available was so dreadful that it wasn't worth having. Over the last four years in Phnom Penh the only channel worth watching was BBC news and after that vanished the only reason to get cable would be so my wife can watch Thai Soaps with crappy Khmer voiceovers. If I had an American bank account, I could get netflix or other net services like spotify, but I don't, so I'm cut off from those services. Before bit torrent and ok bandwidth, expats shared VHS tapes of TV shows from whatever country you came from. The English and Korean's seemed especially well organized. For movies, local night markets sold pirate VHS, then VCD (which was never a thing in the West from what I heard) and now DVDs. For a while you could buy legal first run VCDs in Bangkok and Hong Kong that cost less than going to the cinema If you lived near a big city you could also go to the cinema. The cinema is very cheap in most of Asia even fo first run western movies. Even better is that many times western movies are shown in two ways, one theatre has "original soundtrack" with subtitles and the other would have painfully bad dubs into Thai or Khmer. Most people go to the dubbed version, so many times the theater with the original soundtrack is half empty! If you have access to bittorrent and an internet connection that can handle YouTube there is certainly no reason to have cable. And even for my wife, she can still get the Thai Soaps on DVD at the market that aren't on YouTube. I've been told that if you are into sports, cable is the only real option most of the time. But then, that's what sports bars are for, and there is no shortage of them in Phnom Penh. And if you're into football (not to be confused with American football), pretty much every local cheap restaurant has multiple big flat screen TVs that only seem to be able to show channels with little figures running around on huge green fields kicking balls to each other. Though from time to time, when the boys aren't looking, the girls will briefy switch to music videos before the boys realize the screen is no longer green color and demand that it be switched back to the game :) People are pretty much the same everywhere...