As far as I understand you can buy an used chinese TV set or DVD player. It's legal. It costs thru the nose, but if the family has means of income (the most common way is small business/trading on the market) it can be done. People are also very social so they manage to catch a glimpse.
The punishment may be draconian but I guess you can reliably evade it by the means of a small bribe.
Pyongyang is kind of special but also nothern regions usually have some niceties due to their proximity to Chinese border (and therefore trade/smuggled goods).
I'm basically parrotting a blogger that writes a lot about both Koreas so I might be not entirely accurate. http://tttkkk.lj.ru/
He writes for Western media occassionally:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Lankov
Look up the articles from the "external links" section, a lot of interesting stuff there. Googling might help too.
The punishment may be draconian but I guess you can reliably evade it by the means of a small bribe.
Pyongyang is kind of special but also nothern regions usually have some niceties due to their proximity to Chinese border (and therefore trade/smuggled goods).
I'm basically parrotting a blogger that writes a lot about both Koreas so I might be not entirely accurate. http://tttkkk.lj.ru/