TV (English) in Costa Rica

I MUST pay for cable TV in order to have my cable internet service and the most reliable cable TV company is Amnet

There are hundreds of channels available and certainly dozens and dozens of English language channels which you can see at

You can see their price list at

Cable TV is NOT available in many parts of the country in which case you may need to go for Direct TV for which I can not seem to find a site.

Scott Oliver – Founder
WeLoveCostaRica.com

PS. Do you get “news” from those stations you mentioned?

Direct TV **Latin America** carries CNN International and a few other English-language entertainment channels. We had it for most of a year but got sick of nothing but re-runs from one channel to another.

The practical alternative is Dr. Dish’s service. They will provide you a satellite dish and a tuner, and facilitate your enrolling as a paid customer of Dish Network. That way, you get the same signal, from the same satellites, as you would in the U.S. Due to the curvature of the earth, you don’t get every channel that you would in the lower 48, but the English-language service is far, far better than Direct TV Latin America.

If you go the Dr. Dish route, you must have a credit account in the U.S. to bill and a phone number someplace in the U.S. where someone can answer and will say that you’re not home right now. Dr. Dish will give you a New York City mailing address which will qualify you to opt for the local broadcast channels (ABC, NBC, etc) if you want them.

Edited on Sep 10, 2008 05:09

Dear Inquiring Mind,

SunSat does not offer an Internet satellite installation, so the answer to your question is that we continue to slog along at about 46kps dial-up speeds. And we hate every minute of it.

Dr. Dish does offer such a satellite uplink installation. If you get the big dish that affords virtually uninterruptible service (2.4 meters), it’s about $7,000 plus around $129 per month for the actual service. You have a choice of speeds and can run that $129 or so up to around $350, I think.

We started out with Dr. Dish’s TV satellite system with a 2.4 meter dish and then upgraded that to his new 3.0 meter dish which made quite a difference when it was raining. Unfortunately, he has not been able to keep up with Dish Network’s everchanging security codes, and we became very frustrated.

We decided that it was a better deal for us to contact SunSat, buy a tuner from them which is compatible with Dr. Dish’s dish (they all point at the same satellite), and enroll as paying subscribers to Dish Network.

Abby
(Dave, actually)

Since this was posted originally, we’ve found Dr. Dish to be the only good option for satellite TV and access to DishNetwork’s U.S. signal.

Edited on Sep 10, 2008 05:11

The BBC channel, in one of its iterations or another, is available on Dish Network’s U.S. signal which can be had here. Read the previous postings.

For reasons I can’t explain, WNET from New York, the PBS station there which is included in the “local channels” package you can get from Dish Network, hangs up our tuner. If we try to tune to it, we have to reboot the tuner. So, sadly, PBS appears to be unavailable here.

Dr. Dish’s e-mail address is: drdishcr@yahoo.com

The larger the dish the better the reception, Stan. I certainly would not install a 1.2 meter dish and for the difference in cost, I’d go for the 3 meter one over the 2.4 meter model.