It’s still much tougher to come by that one might think. For one thing, European networks don’t care about distributing their content outside of Europe, even in exchange for actual money. For another, a huge proportion of the content is dubbed from English, which isn’t ideal. Even pirating the stuff’s pretty hard, since there’s (apparently) little interest in it.
Japanese may be a pain in the ass to learn but it’s hard not to be jealous of the resources and media available to Japanese learners, as someone learning most any other language (though, in the US at least, Spanish media’s pretty easy to get ahold of)
IF you can find them. Also you have no idea about quality. I've watched several videos in my TL where the plot was 1 here is what I'm going to do, then 10 minutes silently doing it, then 1 minute of reflection. There are a lot of videos of one guy doing something without talking. Note that the above is probably a reflection on my tastes.
I've also watched several videos and concluded after a while that it wasn't my TL but a related language.
Best way to start is watching tv news. Hosts have very clear pronuntiation, it's their job after all.
I first research what tv channels are more popular in the country, then search YouTube with that info. YouTube doesn't seem to offer a lot of search options, but it's possible to do the search from Google or DuckDuckGo and later select "videos" tab.
DuckDuckGo has a dropdown menu that allows search localization, so the first results are the most relevant to the selected country. Once you find a handful of interesting channels, you're set up.
The only thing I disagree with is best. Best is subjective, I find most news boring an irrelevant (a lot of gossip about people I don't care about) so while it is great if you can stand it, I tend to get mad about the subjects they consider worth covering and turn it off.
This is a reflection on me of course - you should have your own opinions.
OK, let's say that it's a good way to learn the language, not so much as entertainment. Actually I agree with you about how little of what we see in the news is worth covering.
Anyway, if there's a channel with lots of contents, it's still possible to select only interesting topics. Maybe it's easier for me, because the language I'm most interested in is English :) Usually I don't even need YouTube, just setting Netflix language to English.
For other languages, I'm mostly interested in listening to specific words pronuntiation, usually names.
If you're interested in french podcast I can highly recommand the French public radio network Radio France. I'm pretty sure they're available anywhere in the world and they produce tons of contents (music, news, science, cultural podcasts) and all of it is available on replay for free.
France Inter is the main radio station, France Culture the "intellectual" one and France Info the live news radio.
It seems to work worldwide: I watch it from Japan. Interestingly most of the commercials are not displayed from here, instead we get the rolling presentation of the channel.
It isn't nearly as effective. I've done both - I was an exchange student to Germany, (Landed with 1 year of US highschool German, maybe 150 words.), and was thinking in German in about 10 months. (I was also 17/18 years old, which makes a huge difference.) For the last few months, I've been trying to get more functional than my "taqueria Spanish", and have shifted to listening/watching mostly Spanish-language media.
It helps, but is nowhere nearly as effective as not being able to escape it. In Germany, I remember going to bed exhausted with a headache quite a bit for a period of months, roughly the phase from when I was barely functional to when I was able to take part in class in non-stupid ways.
Watching TV for a couple hours is nothing like that.
