Blog - TV setup hell
TV setup hell
Disclaimer: This is about my experience about our one TV at home, setting it up to watch a specific channel our cable TV provider offers. It may not be the case with all TVs and/or TV providers in Japan, but I'll generalize a bit for the sake of keeping it short.
Logically, you'd think that cable TV is as easy in Japan as in North America (and I believe elsewhere). Something that should be as easy as pushing one or two buttons on a remote control is however comparable to a radio scanning experience.
At any given time, our TV knows 12 channels (let's call them "positions"), its remote control has 12 position buttons (1 to 12), and there's no cheating combining them (e.g. 3+2 to get channel 32).
Our cable TV provider offers 16 channels on its basic plan our "mansion" is subscribed to. Which means that at any time there are 4 cable TV channels that we can't see without remapping one of the TV's 12 positions. Sounds stupid? That's not all.
Now, mapping one of our TV's positions to one of the cable TV provider's channels really should be as easy as going in a setup menu and selecting channel 14 for position 2. However it's a bit more complicated than that.
The setup menu in question (pictured) shows something ressembling a volume control, but it's in fact a sort of "radio tuner". 99% of it is snow, and in there are the 16 available channels, in mixed-up order. In order to find a channel, you hit one of two arrows and watch the snow while the tuner slowly goes through all the "frequencies", then when it finds a channel you have to figure out if it's the one you want. To make things yet more complicated, there are not one but three of these tuners (UHF, VHF and something else).
The whole experience sums up to scanning through while looking up the TV guide to see what's supposed to be on the channel I want.
I'd love if someone could contradict me telling me that it's only my own TV that's crap, but from what I've heard from a few other people I think it's just the way it is. So how did it ever get this bad?
Posted on February 6, 2005 at 22:29 | Tweet
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Hmmm, never heard of that before. Usually they give you a tuner which means you don't use the TV tuner, just set the TV to line in and use the cable tuner for all the channels. So you use the TV as a monitor.
Seems like you must have a single tuner that is shared amongst everyone in your building complex so that you do have to use the search method, although I have never heard of that before.
Most TV's have a auto channel search thing that will set them for you like on a car stereo.
Posted by Roy on February 7, 2005 at 00:08
Interesting. I'd expect to have a tuner making it all easy, but they don't provide us with one. Maybe because it's the basic-deep-low-end service?
Our subscription is legit though cause some cable guy from the provider comes every year to all apartments and makes sure everything is working fine. Then he also offers to set our TV channels for us, and it seems normal to him too ("You don't need the shopping channel, right? I'll put that other one instead.").
The scanning is automatic (it goes through the snow and stops at the next channel), but channels are still in disorder and a pain to find.
Posted by Patrick on February 7, 2005 at 00:15
I usually give my VCR a swing at these sorts of issues . Sometimes you find automatic capabilities on them that aren't on the TV ... though perhaps you don't have things plugged in a chain or don't think turning on the VCR is much of a solution.
Posted by ndkent on February 7, 2005 at 17:11
Hey Nick, just want to say thanks for the idea. I haven't yet tried it out, but I will soon.
My VCR's remote doesn't have any buttons to select the channel except "+" and "-", so it doesn't really occur to me to watch TV through the VCR, however it may still be better at handling this stuff.
I'll post back after checking!
Posted by Patrick on February 8, 2005 at 10:43
that reminds me exactly on how I had to seek out TV stations when I lived in Germany 8 years ago ... it has always been like that (well .. much earlier it was actually a dial that you had to turn and no on screen 'volume' display)
Posted by Peter on February 8, 2005 at 19:54
Wow, that must have been a pain. Was that for cable or just for regular antenna TV?
Posted by Patrick on February 8, 2005 at 21:18
Nick, you were right, the VCR makes it a bit easier. At least there's no analog-style tuning, instead you have to go match with preset channel numbers, just how I said I wished it would be ("Now, mapping one of our TV's positions to one of the cable TV provider's channels really should be as easy as going in a setup menu and selecting channel 14 for position 2").
Not so bad. :)
Thanks for the hint!
Posted by Patrick on February 9, 2005 at 00:38
Hello
Do you get Hindi channels in tokyo, please guide if you do get it.
Eg: star tv,zee tv, sony tv...
thank you
Posted by Ismail on October 27, 2006 at 19:45
I checked the sites of services I know of, and didn't find info about these or other Hindi channels.
Posted by Patrick on October 28, 2006 at 01:30