I'm moving to Italy soon and looking for information on what is available.

At this point I have no idea what's available, Siena area. Preferably inexpensive, we are not into paying for watching commercials. I find that really insane.

Also what are options for receiving US content? I have thought about a high speed internet connection and something like a sling box pro here (in the US) but I don't know how well that would work.

Any information would be appreciated.

Thanks!

If you will still have a house in the US with a decent broadband connection, the Slingbox method may be the most straight forward option to receiving live content from the US. If you don’t already have a Slingbox, going by the info I game across, the box connects to the video source (such as a cable or satellite receiver) and to the network, such as a broadband router. When you are in Italy, just run the Slingbox client from your PC to connect. The video quality will depend on what the uplink capacity of your US connection is.

From what I recall, Comcast has at least a 1.5Mbps uplink, which should be fast enough to stream near DVD quality video, however, if the house in the US will have people using file sharing programs (such as BitTorrent), it may not be possible to get a stable stream when these programs are active with files being shared/downloaded.

Unfortunately there are no US broadcasts available in Italy, apart from the occasional satellite feeds. The main satellite provider there is Sky Italy (Pay TV), which has a small selection of dual-language (English & Italian) channels, but like most TV shows in Europe, many shows would be ones already shown in the US starting anywhere from a few months ago.

My father has FiOS, 5MB internet with HD video. I can probably work a deal with him, he doesn't do any kind of streaming or downloading and with the time difference I would be using it when he was not on. I suspect they might consider it a violation of the terms of service though. I'll have to look at that.

FiOS comes with a Tivo like device and if the sling box could control that it would be a perfect solution. If I am able to get a good connections in Siena.