I am not usually a laptop PC user and have never really even used a "smart phone" because I just don't need one that badly.
Anyway, I have used PCI and PCIe connected cards (add-on cards) inside many tower PC's over at least the past decade for receiving/tuning, hardware decoding, and lastly "to-the-video-card shipping" for displaying many "OTA ATSC" channels for free (OTA ATSC stands for Over the Air Advanced Television Systems Committee). Check out their wesbite at ATSC dot org to learn all they have to do in order to bring to everyone "free TV."
The latest generation of these OTA ATSC tuner chips use a PCIex1 interface and have been shrunken down to about 1cm x1cm in size. They perform outstandingly with no bus contention, the x1 PCIe link connection speed is more than enough, tuner selectivity (channel lock-on) is now excellent compared to back around 2005-06, etc. And, some manufacturers even produce USB 2.0 based OTA ATSC receivers in the form of small 4x4x1 inch boxes. But that is clumsy and a machine's USB 2.0 electrical network might get clogged.
So, is adding a tiny Conexant brand chip something companies do not want to do for some reason? Or, are they doing that and I'm quite ignorant?
I get the feeling that if people started to like the FREE OTA ATSC channels on their mobile devices, then they would curtail their use of streaming media and that means, uh oh, less gouging of customers. Just tell the laptop/phone's software to record HD channel 5.1 and you can watch the program later.
Let me know what you think. I would like to hear from all sides on a topic like this.
Anyway, I have used PCI and PCIe connected cards (add-on cards) inside many tower PC's over at least the past decade for receiving/tuning, hardware decoding, and lastly "to-the-video-card shipping" for displaying many "OTA ATSC" channels for free (OTA ATSC stands for Over the Air Advanced Television Systems Committee). Check out their wesbite at ATSC dot org to learn all they have to do in order to bring to everyone "free TV."
The latest generation of these OTA ATSC tuner chips use a PCIex1 interface and have been shrunken down to about 1cm x1cm in size. They perform outstandingly with no bus contention, the x1 PCIe link connection speed is more than enough, tuner selectivity (channel lock-on) is now excellent compared to back around 2005-06, etc. And, some manufacturers even produce USB 2.0 based OTA ATSC receivers in the form of small 4x4x1 inch boxes. But that is clumsy and a machine's USB 2.0 electrical network might get clogged.
So, is adding a tiny Conexant brand chip something companies do not want to do for some reason? Or, are they doing that and I'm quite ignorant?
I get the feeling that if people started to like the FREE OTA ATSC channels on their mobile devices, then they would curtail their use of streaming media and that means, uh oh, less gouging of customers. Just tell the laptop/phone's software to record HD channel 5.1 and you can watch the program later.
Let me know what you think. I would like to hear from all sides on a topic like this.