Television has certainly changed over the years both in delivery and content. We have witnessed excellent period dramas such as Upstairs Downstairs and The Forsythe Saga to the reality rubbish of today such as The Osbornes, and utterly banal Desperate Scousewives.
It is in delivery though that we have seen the most change. When I arrived in Bahrain English television options were Bahrain 55 and Saudi Aramco 33, and you needed an antenna rotator to be able to switch between the two.
During my first week here I was watching TV when a James Bond film came on. I can’t remember which one, but a two-hour film lasted just 45 minutes with huge chunks removed by the ‘censors’.
Since then we have moved first to satellite TV and then IPTV. When satellite TV arrived everybody stuck big dishes on their roofs. I moved to Amwaj which had a bylaw forbidding satellite dishes. Within three weeks they were everywhere, I had three.
To receive the best channels you needed something called a Dream Box, which used an Internet connection to share one password between thousands and so instead of paying BD20 a month to a satellite broadcaster you were paying BD20 a year to a little dodgy shop. But it worked. Eventually the broadcasters found ways around it and it sort of died out, although I have a version to this day where I receive two BBC Polish channels.
Then the great move to IPTV. Again you could subscribe via various Internet providers to a host of channels or you could just get the KODI box, an Internet equivalent of the Dream Box.
The KODI box lets you access hundreds of live channels from all over the world as well as thousands of hours of stored programmes. My son found all the Doctor Who episodes so we haven’t seen him for weeks. And this is not illegal as there is on the Internet a site called
Filmon where you can legitimately stream TV channels live from all over the world, and the KODI box is just a means of running that site on your telly rather than the computer.
However there is a downside. While I am supposed to be working during the day I sometimes have the TV on and can watch BBC or ITV live with no problems, but in the evening at around 7.30pm when we are settling down to watch The Chase, buffering starts in earnest. I have a 4G LTE connection which means my Internet bandwidth is variable, in the morning and afternoon as there are few people in Amwaj I get 20-30 Mbps but at 7.30pm every night I am lucky if I am getting 1 Mbps, and of course that affects streaming programmes to the point where they become impossible to watch.
It’s like the roads. If you build more lanes then we will buy more cars and fill them up. Well ISPs put out more and more bandwidth but we keep finding more and more ways to utilise the Internet and fill it up.
Here is the challenge; 5G is coming with its 100 Mbps simultaneous for thousands of users in each cell. There are many ISPs in Bahrain. First one to offer 5G wins the customers, c’mon chaps get on it.
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