satellite tv in malaysia

not much related to travel and touristic stuff but you will need this when you decide to stay more than a month.

in malaysia there is only one legal satellite tv provider, astro. actually it has a good variety of channels and satisfying enough for a touristic island. i mean, there are always better things to do than sitting and zapping. they have movie channels, lots of news and sports channels, music stuff etc. most of them are in english so language is not a problem. but the subtitle and sound selection do not work. just in a couple of channels. sound quality is good but visual quality is poor. it is digital broadcast but not a good one. when you are using a regular tv, this is not a problem but with a hi-res tv like a lcd or plasma tv, or a projection like my friend's epson, you can see the poor quality of the broadcast. but as i said, sound is okay. it's not surround most of the time but some movies have surround.

one totally annoying thing is censorship. they are sensoring every single bad (!) word, shit, fuck, whore, bitch etc. also hot kissing scenes so of course they censor all kind of erotic scenes. but something interesting is they also censor arabic / Islamic related words like selamin aleykum, or Allah-u Ekber. i have no idea why they are doing this, this is an Islamic country and these are very common words in Islam. i was just watching kingdom of heaven and they censored all these speeches of saracens.