Armed Forces Network

Thank you for the questions! I will try to answer as many as possible over the next few weeks.

We do have television in the hotel room and can purchase cable once we are in base quarters. The television has 8 channels that are produced by the Armed Forces Network. Each channel has a purpose, for example there is one for kids, news, sports, movies, etc.

The programming selected is geared to military families. They never play unappropriate content. Also, there is no sense of channel-specific shows. For example, on the news channel from 6PM to 7:30PM they will play all three major network's news shows back to back. I'm a fan of NBC's Nightly News with Brian Williams so I watch at 6:30.

During the day they may show one HGTV show and then one FoodNetwork show. The rest of the content will be one show from a variety of channels such as Discovery, History, etc.

The movie channel is weird. So far all the movies have been from 1995 or earlier. Nothing recent at all. Also, the ratings are never higher than PG13.

The best part is the commericals. There are no commericals on AFN so the military puts in public service announcements and homemade commercials. They are terribly bad, but always make me laugh. Sometimes they give information on upcoming events, but most of the time it is two Marines with a video camera and some really bad animations.