Questions re: cable/satellite tv in Beijing

[magores]

Forgive me for asking questions that have probably been asked a million times before, but...

Anyone have advice on cable/satellite service in Beijing?

-Good companies? Bad companies?

-I'm primarily interested in HBO, CNN, and ESPN (Discovery, History, and Cartoons, would be nice though)

-I have a flyer in front of me with a package for 2800RMB. Is that per month or year, or what? Flyer doesn't say (at least, not in English.)

Thanks,

[imron]

Are you able to post a scan of the flyer?

[Pengyou]

I considered doing the same thing in Tianjin. The price I was given was about 2,400 rmb. This included the cost of the hardware and the cost of 1 year of service. It did not include any western channels. The hardware itself costs about 2,000 rmb

[jeffofarabia]

When I lived in Beijing my apartment had basic cable as a service. All of the English channels were scrambled. Some parts of Beijing only had HBO, CNN and Star Sports for the English channels, while other parts had those three plus ESPN, StarWorld and AXN and BBC. So make sure you find out what you are getting before paying. CCTV9 was the only English channel I had for two years, but I could listen to CNN, though not see it (strangly enough it was unscrambled for the invasion of Iraq in 2003).