I would love some suggestions on how I could possibly get some other channels on my TV. I currently use my tiny laptop for most TV viewing but this is becoming highly annoying.
There are a few issues which is preventing me from getting normal cable:
-There is only 1 cable company that can provide cable tv/fast speed internet in my area - CableCom. However, it appears that in my complex, everyone must have it or nobody can have it. Annoying as this is, it seems to be true. Before I arrived, the individual owners had a meeting and pulled the plug on CableCom. Instead they installed a satellite dish for everyone's enjoyment (the cheap option).
-The satellite dish is shared and so not controlled individually. The channels are very limited and pretty awful - maybe 6 in Italian and 5 in German. There are 2 in French (neither work well and are not mainstream anyway) and 1 in English - CNN. CNN recently changed satellites, so I no longer get it. Since I do not speak German, only a limited amount of Italian, I can no longer really watch TV.
-I have an internet connection with Swisscom, but it is very slow. A good day is 2.5-3.5 MB per second so I cannot get cable tv from them (it appears one needs a min. of 4-5 MB). According to them, the lack of fiber optics in my area has to do with the commune, not them. Who knows if this is true.
-Nor can I use Google Cast which also requires a higher speed internet connection.
Besides getting my own satellite, does anyone have any ideas of how to better my situation? I had no idea how shitty the communications system was here until I had already moved in. And people who live here do not seem to care because they use their flats here as holiday homes (rather than a permanent one like me). So, they are rarely here.
Who knew that "normal" TV was so hard to come by in Switzerland. Sigh.
Yes I also use a VPN to watch other stuff on TV and to download BBC iPlayer material and ITV, a good suggestion but I thought he just wanted a quick fix.
I personally would set up a satellite dish if you had a south facing balcony and use a Freesat box for UK TV.
All the TV over IP require decent bandwidth to work which I believe the OP does not have. My advice and providing you can actually do it is to install a satellite dish/system, with that and depending on how much you are welling to spend you can get thousands of channels with English ones on Astra 28.2, German on Hotbird 13 and even Italian/French on Astra 19.2
When I get an appartment I have a list. Top of the list is very fast internet followed by a south facing balcony so I can set up my dish. I used to have a motorized dish in the old days when we had D2 and D2Mac with all the gizmos for getting the latest films but now it's just Astra as I only speak 2 languages, English and Scouse.
These days there is so much on the net, I suggested Filmon as it doesn't need a very fast connection ....... I think. Anyway it is free and you can try it out at no cost. Let us know how you get on.