Regarding Foxtel, I also cannot get foxtel due to the BC not willing to fund the Foxtel installation. I can fully sympathise, those thieves at Foxtel are asking for $40k from the BC to get Foxtel connected, which is an insane amount fo cable a 15 year old building.
My alternative was to get Foxtel for Samsung Smart TVs.
My findings?
Complete and utter waste of money unless you want sport. Even then, hard to justify thanks to Foxtel being such bastards.
Three main reasons:
1) Poor streaming quality (forever buffering in peak hours).
During the day, you can watch it all you want in high quality mode. At night, it all goes to crap and buffers every 10 - 15 seconds. I can watch Netflix (a US service) at night without any quality issues, but not Foxtel (an Australian service).
This made the rugby practically unwatchable. I switched off Fox coverage before the Lions test even got near to starting out of sheer frustration.
Watching Super Rugby I have no choice but to suffer through the buffering every 10 - 20 seconds, even in low quality mode. It makes watching games as enjoying as sticking knitting needles into my eyeballs.
I initially intended to complain to Foxtel, until I read a thread on Whirlpool of users who had complained. Foxtel deny everything, telling each customer that "they are the only complaint they have received". Foxtel also make you reset everything to factory default before even trying to work with you, including TV, router, and so on. Now I am so demoralised I can't even be bothered contact them to complain and am keenly awaiting the end of rugby season to cancel this cancer of a service.
2) Foxtel just don't get how a real streaming model should work.
Nothing, NOTHING, for me is on demand. It's a streaming service, and all I can watch are a couple of set channels. I don't even get the +2 channels! They have also replaced the halfway decent Lifestyle channel with the totally crap and useless Lifestyle YOU channel.
3) Price.
So how much do I pay for this poor quality, restricted service? An insane $50 a month. In constrast, Netflix is a whole $8 a month and on demand. As soon as the rugby season finishes, I am cancelling my account with some joy.
All round, the Samsung TV Foxtel service is utter rubbish and I cannot recommend it to anyone in its current state. Without question, the market is there for a streaming product, but Foxtel have it so, so, so wrong.
The funny part is, in my old place I could get Foxtel, and thus had a Foxtel Go account. It actually wasn't that bad, with some content being available on demand, and other content (like sports) being able to be watching like on TV.
With this (Foxtel on Smart TVs) abortion of a product, Foxtel are pretty much providing low quality TV over the internet at high prices.