Bringing TV to your PC

Ever since the personal computer took off in the 90’s, there’s been a movement to merge it with the world’s most popular entertainment medium – Television. It’s been a slow convergence but as a new gizmo I profile on this week’s NBC-TV High Tech Talk segment called the TV stick is making for a media marriage that seems to work.

It’s known as the WinTV-HVR950 TV stick and right out of the box, this handy gizmo is very easy to install. You run the install CD and plug it in.

Now they advertise this for a laptop computer. But our experiments were pretty dismal. The reception of over the air stations was grainy and gritty. Besides… do you really want to watch TV on a laptop? I don’t think so.
Bu if you hook the TV stick up to a desktop PC, and plug in an outside antenna or, better yet, a cable TV hookup, it works very well. Not only can you watch TV, but it has a built recorder, which lets you save your favorite shows right to your computer hard drive.

Suggested retail is about $100. I found it online for between $80-$90.

There’s another way to get TV to your PC… in this case, satellite TV channels. It all works through the Internet in a pretty cool way. Forget the roof-mounted dish or the expensive cable connection. This system supposedly lets you access up to 3,000 international satellite TV stations that are beamed directly to your PC. Think of VoIP for satelliet TV. It’s all perfectly legal and involves a $49 program.

You do need a broadband connection for the best audio and video pickup and it claims to work anywhere, picking up stations from Albania to Venezuela. Because the stations are streamed via the Internet, you don’t need any extra hardware or a PC card, either.

Click Here for info on Satellite TV on Your PC
[eminimall]