TV wise you have roughly 4 options:
1 Free to air digital TV (Freeview), which offers around 20 channels.
2 Sky satellite subscription, which offers 30+ channels depending on what you subscribe to. Usually starting around $50/month. Most houses have a Sky dish and you don't usually pay for hardware, except perhaps for set top boxes.
3 Generic satellite, but more and more satellite contact available from NZ is encoded/scrambled unless you pay for it. You pay upfront for all hardware.
4 On demand from various parts of the world, the legality of which is subject to debate.
There was a great service called Igloo, which was sort of a hybrid of Freeview and Sky, using encoded digital TV. For $20/month you got 15 or so channels, including BBC World--and all the Freeview channels too. When Sky killed the Igloo project last year, those of us who were subscribers were given Sky at a reduced rate.