Surviving without World Cup Cable TV

Since the advent of Cable TV in Singapore, it has been a challenge for the non-subscriber to catch live action on TV. With the serious amounts of money TV Stations are paying for live coverage, the ordinary Joe with just the basic Mediacorp channels are only granted 4 matches on TV. Four, that’s just sad.

Now you can’t even watch the matches on the basic Cable TV Sports Group channels, you have to subscribe to the pay-per-view World Cup Package at $15.75. That’s day-light robbery!

Well, you can always get around it if you invite yourself over to a accommodating friend’s pad or drop into a pub showing live action, but there are always limits to friendship and your budget for alcohol.

The next best thing - coffee shops and even a few selected Mc Donalds. Yes, if you ever saw the crowds at the coffee shops and Mc Donalds outlet in Clementi on Saturday, you’ll probably wonder whether there was a special dinner promotion that you were missing out. There were just so many people during the England-Paraguay match that there wasn’t even much standing room available. I managed to squeeze in between the local punters, foreign workers and young football fans to enjoy half of the match. But as most of us were just taking advantage of the free live coverage, the only business boom that the coffee shop was enjoying was probably that of the few beer drinking uncles.

The other option to get free live coverage is to get yourself one of those living room antennas and pray that your home is within range of the Malaysian and Indonesian TV signals. Knowing the TV schedules of those stations also does help. From my 19^th floor room, I am able to receive both NTV7 and TV2 from Malaysia. These two stations alone will probably telecast half of the matches. But dang, TV1 signal does not seem to reach my antenna. Fortunately though, Indonesia is close enough and SCTV happen to beam right up to my TV. The reception from SCTV is a little poor, but with all 64 matches being screened, I can’t complain. Funny, I thought SCTV was a private broadcaster that charges for these live broadcasts.

Now I can watch live action from the comfort of my bed. Life is good …