Watching sports on television in India
Watching sports on television in India
Right now I'm watching the U.S. Open tennis tournament on television.
In the last seven months I have gotten almost obsessed over several sporting events.
In Pushkar I got caught up in the U.S. Master's Golf Tournament. It was broadcast in the middle of the night. The only television in the hotel was in the rooftop restaurant. I gave up watching it at night. But they often would show a replay of it the following day and I saw Phil Mickelson won.
In June I watched the World Cup football tournament. Games were on ESPN. All of the games were broadcast live. They would start at nine at night and finish up at three in the morning. The little restaurants in Old Manali showed them. It was rainy and cold at the beginning of June, so Westerners were huddled at the tables. The occasional powercuts usually happened when your team needed to score a goal.
When I left Manali to explore Kinnaur and Spiti Valleys, I went through a World Cup crisis. Towns would have no power, or have only a handful of channels that managed to show cricket highlights all day but no soccer.
Now the U.S. Open is on. It is on New York time, so it starts here around seven in the evening. Ten Sports then shows it continuously live. So I can watch it for a little while at nine at night. Then when I wake up in the morning they are replaying the matches. It's quite remarkable that I can see so much of it. I saw Andre Agassi play the final match of his career and Jelena Jankovic upset three top ten seeds to make it to the semifinals.
It's coming up short on Notre Dame football. I think the best I can do there is try to download an mp3 of the radio coverage the next day.
India television is a subject unto itself. There are a whole slew of channels, many of them broadcast across Asia by large network companies. There is no broadcast television. Instead, the signal is captured by satellite, and then distributed via cable.
While traveling watching television is an escape. It is an immersion in the familiar. For better or worse, American television is part of my culture. It is also thoroughly entrenched in cultures throughout the world.
Watching sports on television in India
