sunnfun

There is no DirectTV but there's tons of free TV channels. Thing is outside of the US people do not pay for ad supported TV. Just put up a satellite dish and enjoy free (although ad supported) TV. No need for dodgy receivers etc., just watch...

When it comes to Pay TV there are many options: The first is OSN Showtime, quite expensive but lots of HD Movie Channels and nature stuff (NGTV, Discovery etc.) with all english audio.

Next thing is european Pay TV (Sky Italia, Sky Germany, CyFrowy [Poland] etc.). It's a bit more difficult to sign up, but doable. Might have to recruit a german or italian friend to use his home address to sign up. They also have lots of american HD movie channels, documentaries and lots of sports with english audio. These typically include MLB, NBA, and college sports. We enjoy MLB, NFL and NCAA football and pretty much tape all of the weekends top games.

Last resort is a Slingbox. Of course for that you need an active subscription back in the US and a high speed data connection there for upload as well as in Dubai for download.

Of course there's always iTunes (legal) and bit torrent (dodgy) for TV Shows and movies. We use both (iTunes when offered and BT when not [stupid TV networks for not offering it; we'd love to pay but when they don't offer it...]) and the quality is quite good most of the time.

One more thing is AppleTV: We used it for MLB.TV this year to watch the regular seasons as well as post season and it was ok most of the time. Of course since the local ISP's have more customers than bandwidth they get quite slow on the weekend and when the game five of the playoffs turns into a slideshow and everyone gets mad you revert to MLB on ESPN America (see above mentioned PayTV...)

Hope this helps?

Let me know if you have more questions.

PS: Oh and since you asked, no Satellite TV is censored here (It's technically impossible, ask Ghaddafy... )