When living in the US we rarely used internet TV. However, we found while living abroad this is the only way to watch TV. The main thing you need is high speed internet and a device to sling it to the TV in the apartment. As a gift, our son-in-law bought us an Apple TV (ATV) to take on our journey. We also bought a Google ChromeCast (GCC) to use as a backup just in case. At our first apartment in Sydney, we set up the Apple TV and loaded a bunch of channel apps on it like Netflix, Discovery, ABC, CBS, NBC and so on. Then we tried to watch The Good Doctor on ABC one night. We just keep getting an error message in which I had no clue what it was telling us. WTH? It appeared that I set it up correctly and I am very technologically savvy so I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. We also tried using the GCC but with the same results. Then it dawned on me 💡because we were outside the US is the reason for the messages.
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Now we can watch “most” things on the ATV such as Netflix, History and Nat Geo. After all of this there are still some channels that must have something programmed into the app that blocks the channel when trying to stream through the ATV or GCC. My pet peeve is CBS. We subscribe to the channel to watch Blue Bloods and 60 Minutes yet we still cannot stream it through the ATV or GCC. The only way is to watch their shows is on our iPad 😡. Then there are some channels that just don’t want to work with the ATV so we use the GCC to cast them to the TV.
This is where you have to learn the workarounds of using internet TV. I actually went through each and every channel app and determined what is the best way to watch that channel. Then I developed a spreadsheet (shit you not!) so when we want to watch a certain program we know what channel it’s on and whether or not to use the ATV, GCC or Screen Mirror from the iPhone. Otherwise, unless you have all of your programs memorized in your head we look at each other and say “what channel was that on?”
Another thing I discovered while looking through the App Store was all the free TV streaming apps. Of course we had to try several of these and downloaded them. Boy, you can’t believe some of the crap on these channels. From old TV shows you never heard of to the worst B rated movies ever. No wonder they are free TV. I’ll bet we went through about a dozen of these until we finally found a few good ones. For the type of TV we like to watch Pluto TV, Crackle and Tubi are our favorites. They give us a good variety of TV shows, series and movies without having to have a cable subscription.
It only took us about a year to figure this all out! Not only did it give me something to investigate but was definitely a learning experience. Despite watching a lot of really bad TV in the last year we are finally watching everything we love 📺❣️