As I've said before, Taiwan is a few years behind the rest in the world in a lot of it's infrastructure. This is especially true when it comes to cable TV. Cable here is still SD, and even more shocking...mono sound. This is a bit strange considering that for over a decade now every house has an HD tv, so you see them watching bland stretched out imagines on their tv. Sound systems however, are very rare in taiwanese households.
Over the last few years cable and internet companies have started to supply cable boxes with some HD channels. These were mostly western channels, but now there seem to be two or three HD taiwanese channels. Although these are not any of the "live" channels, and usually show older dramas that have been uprezzed. The sound has been upgraded to the mighty "stereo" with a very small select few channels being 5.1.
To get these HD boxes into more homes, they pretty much give them away for free (provided you already have their cable tv or internet service) but only give you a few channels. There are then tiered paid package for more and more channels. It's all relatively cheap (less than ten bucks a month for all the channels) but they are all pretty worthless channels, so I don't bother with it.
What I really want is sports, and it is severely lacking, especially when it comes to special sporting events. There was nothing showing March Madness, or Euro 2012. But now I see this was all just to set up so it could shock me with the most surprising thing I've ever seen in Taiwan...
With the Olympics, the HD cable service has added 12 channels dedicated to showing HD olympics coverage 24 hours a day. This is unbelievably shocking that they would actually take the time and energy to get the olympics to show here, and provide so many channels so it can show a variety of coverage. But perhaps the most shocking thing, coming from this country that is years behind....one of the channels is in 3D!!!
Yep you can see it pictured above. Since i don't have a 3D tv, it just shows it as a double image, but still shocking none the less. It's also interesting to see the choices in olympic coverage. There is one channel dedicated to just showing Taiwanese athletes and their stories. This is where I practiced my chinese watching a story about a female Taiwanese weight lifter. I understood enough to get interested in her and watch her live competition where she got the silver medal. But it's also interesting to see how much they focus on sports that china is participating in. The Olympics is one of those things where most of the year Taiwanese abhor China, but then when China does something good, suddenly China and Taiwan are twins.
Speaking of which because Taiwan is in a special situation diplomatically, in the olympics it's known as Chinese Taipei. I'd be very curious to know more about why they chose the name "Taipei" as it's just one city in the country. I can understand why they didn't use Taiwan, as that would mean they are a separate country, but it seems like they could have chosen another name that wouldn't belittle everybody who doesn't live in Taipei. Also I've heard conflicting info as to how Taiwan is allowed to participate. I think the prevailing theory is that Taiwanese athletes can only participate in events where China is not.
