Broadcast television
There are 7 national and around 15 regional broadcast television channels. If you’re in Santiago you’re lucky if you can tune in to all 7 national channels, and some smaller towns and rural areas with signal coverage may only receive 1 or 2 channels. As you’d expect, pay TV penetration is relatively high in Chile.
The vast majority of the programming on broadcast television is in Spanish. Foreign films tend to be dubbed into Spanish rather than subtitled. So if you’re looking for international programming and movies with audio in the original language, you’ll need to go with pay TV.
Pay television
Because prices and bundles are constantly changing, any specific plans or offers I post here will be out of date as soon as they’re published. So do your research: decide what you want and find out who offers it in your area. Here are lists of basic products and providers, to get you started.
Products
- Analog Cable
- Digital Cable (subscription)
- Digital Cable (prepaid)
- Satellite Television
- Cable Television + other services
Providers
Tips
- If you’re also going to get phone service and an internet connection, it probably makes the most financial sense to get all three with one provider, so find out which ones offer a “Triple Pack” in your area.
- Some providers offer a secondary audio program (SAP) for certain channels, which transmits the audio track of the content of that channel in the original language. This is an important feature for English-speaking expat parents, since most of the children’s channels have SAP. If kids are watching television anyway, this can be an important means of reinforcing their English— for many, their only exposure to the language is at home through one of their parents. Ojo: In the case of analog cable, your television must have SAP capability. For digital cable, the decoder (cable box) itself will handle this feature.