You know those TV shows (I’m thinking Oprah) where they tell you how much money you can save if you stop smoking? Well, I’m saving money now too – not by giving up smoking, but by giving up Big Corporate Commercial TV!

Actually, I’m not giving up TV – not by a long shot. What I am giving up is subscription digital satellite TV, better known in Israel as “YES.”

Yes, this post is about saying no to YES (the truth is I thought of that line a long time ago, but I promised to give Jameel credit. We like Jameel). YES was costing me NIS 290 a month ($77 a month in current shekels!), an astronomical price for much of what turns out to be content (upwards of 80%, I would say) I can get for FREE, using an alternative satellite decoder that subscribes to the hundreds of free to air TV stations broadcasting in the Middle East.

I’ve been investigating the idea of dumping YES for awhile, so I did quite a bit of research on alternatives – and I knew exactly what to expect with the one meter dish I had installed, aimed at two satellites, Israel’s Amos, which has the six Israeli stations and Middle East TV, and Nilesat, which carries about 600 channels. Yes, most of them are Arabic, but there are enough English language one to make getting rid of YES worth it.

Until very recently, YES and HOT (the cable provider) had you over a barrel, because it was the only way even to get Israel Channel 10 (Recently Channels 1 and 2 went digital, and now you need a terrestrial decoder even to watch those). Now, if you want to watch any TV at all, you need a terrestrial digital box, which costs a couple of hundred shekels (I think) But for not much more, you can get a satellite decoder which you can attach to your YES satellite dish connection, if you’re already a customer (when you cancel your service, YES leaves the dish in place). The YES dishes are 80 centimeters, and most people I know who do this are able to use them to get the Nilesat broadcasts. If you want to be “sure” you’ll have access to the wide range of stations on Nilesat or don’t have a YES dish, you can get a one meter dish (like I did) for a few hundred more shekels.

I won’t go into the details, but suffice to say that on Nilesat, there are about 25 English language channels – news, sports and entertainment – all broadcasting free to air. From what I’ve seen so far, the programs on the free channels are equal (if not superior) to the YES content; the Dubai MBC English language movie stations (there are three of them), for example, all have the same movies that YES was charging 40 shekels a month for customers to watch as part of the “movie package.” There hasn’t been a decent program on the YES entertainment stations (channels 12, 13, 14) for a long time, imho, but the programs on the two MBC entertainment channels, as well as Fox Series (where you can watch The Simpsons 10 times a day!), along with a couple of other light entertainment channels, more than make up for YES’s offerings.

In fact, YES can thank MBC for making me a non-customer – it just highlighted the greed of the company. As I mentioned, the MBC channels are all free to air – meaning that YES could rebroadcast them without it costing them a nickel. But even worse; the one Arabic language MBC station is part of their “premium” Arabic package! Not that I watch Arabic TV (although I have plenty of opportunity to do so now!), but if you’re going to rebroadcast one of the MBCs, why not all of them!? But of course they wouldn’t – because then you might not order their “premium” entertainment package! Why pay for what you can see for free?

The truth is, it wasn’t even the money that got us to cancel. What we really hated about YES were, believe it or not, the “promos.” At all hours of the day and night, YES would broadcast promos for the most depraved programs – running the most depraved clips from the programs! And while I wouldn’t care if they did it at night, during “adult time,” I couldn’t take how they insisted on doing it during the afternoon, between shows the kids watch! I know quite a few people who felt the same way, but I’m sure they got the same reaction I did when I called YES to complain – double-talk, accusations that I was hallucinating (true story!), and being ignored.

They just don’t care – until you call to cancel. Now, I’ve got service reps left and right begging me to stay. By the way – don’t try to quit if you have a contract (ie wait till it runs out, because it will cost you at least NIS 400 to break it!). I haven’t had a contract for awhile, so theoretically I should be able to call up and cancel immediately. No way, though; I have to wait for a “senior service person” to call me up and “confirm” that I want to cancel (no doubt I will have to endure some sales pitch). But that’s to be expected, too – they learned it at the “nickel and dime” school of making money, quite common among many Israeli companies. This way, they can keep me on the line for another week or so.

Meanwhile, I’m quite happy with my 35 or so watchable stations (supplemented, of course, by iTunes podcasts and downloaded shows – but that’s another post). I’m thinking I should get someone to back a show I might produce about How to Save Money By Cutting the Cable (or the DBS dish). I bet they won’t show it on YES, though!

Not to sound racist, but there’s no way a person raised in a Western country can’t feel some consternation when a person of clearly Arabic background gets on a plane. 9/11 was just too much of a shock to the system, and it’s impossible not to do some personal profiling, even if you try not to.

The same applies to Arabic text. If you’re from the United States or Israel (and probably lots of other countries) it’s impossible not to look at a page of Arabic writing and not get “nervous” – as in, “it must be some anti-Israel/anti-Jewish/pro-terrorist screed.” We’ve come to expect it, especially in Israel. And if you live in an area where there is lots of Arabic on the radio (such as Israel), you get the same suspicions listening to broadcasts of speakers who are dramatically intoning – something.

Other than learning to understand Arabic, there’s little you can do about the audio “threat” (one of my daughters more or less taught herself Arabic, so she can make out what goes on in these broadcasts). But for the rest of us who are too lazy/uninterested/incapable of learning a new language at this point in our lives, there’s Google Translations. There are lots of reasons not to like Google (like the people here say), but one amazing thing Google has done, imho, is Google Translate, where you can paste in text or URLs and get them automatically translated between dozens of languages – like English, Arabic, and Hebrew, as well as Swedish, Finnish, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, and of course the more “pedestrian” languages like Italian and French (no offense meant!).

Google Translate has helped me out numerous times – including just this afternoon, as I was writing a feature story on Israeli boxing. As part of the story, I wanted to mention the tragic death of a former Israeli Golden Gloves champ, Karim Nayif Bathish, who was killed a couple of weeks ago in an auto accident. I really wanted a picture of Bathish, but couldn’t find one anywhere – on the English and Hebrew sites, that is. Then I got the bright idea to Google Bathtish’s name in Arabic, seeking out articles about him on Israeli websites in Arabic. As a local hero in Nazareth and Haifa, you’d figure there would be a couple of articles. And indeed there were – complete with picture. The articles were quite factual, and the talkbacks were all what you would expect (mourning for the victim, etc.).

This isn’t the first time I’ve used Google Translate to research an article on Arabic language websites – I actually wrote an article in the JPost about it last year. And of course, I can’t help but check out other stories than the ones I was searching for on these sites. Let’s just say that while some fill the post-9/11 stereotype, most don’t. Believe it or not, “they” are not as obsessed with us as we think they are!

The thrust of my boxing article is how the organization tries to promote co-existence (most of the boxers are Arab or Russian kids). The director of the organization, Dr. Shahade, told me than in 20 years of running the Israel Boxing Association, there hasn’t been one ethnic/religious fight among the boxers! That’s great for kids who are in shape enough to box – but how can the rest of us avoid tension? Maybe Google Translate is the arena for us!