"Idol" Hands

For quite a while I had been mulling over a blog post about how technology continues to shrink the distance from home for expats. I would have described some of the cool toys that let us keep in touch with friends and family, access entertainment from home, etc., and how things have changed since our previous overseas stints. A future post may go into a little more detail on that, but today I had to share a lesson about how sometimes the simplest solution is best.

By way of background, getting American TV programming in Qatar isn't difficult at all, but finding what you want is like hunting a needle in a haystack. Some programs are listed in the daily newspapers, with varying degrees of accuracy. Normally when we do find a show we like it's at least a season behind and we've already seen it.

For these reasons, expats often go to great lengths (and expense) to get TV shows from home. One pricey option is the DVD boxed set, but that means waiting until the end of the season. For those of us who have U.S. credit cards and billing addresses, Apple TV offers a good but somewhat expensive option for keeping up on current shows. Otherwise, downloading or streaming shows from sites like Megavideo or Hulu is a low-cost but also low-quality way to get the latest episodes.

We have been using some of the download sites, which isn't easy since these sites don't usually allow downloading from overseas, and were proud that we had actually figured out a way to get American Idol onto our TV. First, we set up a VPN connection with a proxy server in the U.S. and downloaded the video. Then we converted the video since the download site uses a format that doesn't work with Apple TV, and transferred the file from the computer to the Apple TV. This all is less complicated than it may sound, but it's very time-consuming. From the time we start downloading a one-hour show until the time we can watch it is at least 5 or 6 hours.

As you can imagine, we don't actually watch a lot of shows this way. However, we wanted to catch up on this season's American Idol and had some free time on our hands for a change, so we managed to download and watch three episodes from last night through today. So far, so good. Then this evening we all sit down to eat our home-delivered pizza (courtesy of Pizza Hut), and just for fun I decide to check the local TV listings. Lo and behold, American Idol is on at 8 pm, but I'm thinking it must be at least a season behind . . . . Actually, it's the current season, and the very next episode following where we had gotten with our downloads. The Arabic subtitles were easy to ignore, and the Arabic commercials provided a bit of fun language practice for Ella.

So it turns out that we can go through the whole convoluted process above to watch a pixelated version of the show on our TV, or we can just flip on the set at 8:00 on Friday night. Guess which one we're going with from now on.