Digital Television and Computers - Watch TV on Your Computer Monitor

Digital television broadcasting uses satellite and terrestrial platforms to deliver content to the viewers. Digital television is available also via cable and IPTV networks. Most people use TV sets to watch their favorite channels, but there is an alternative way of watching television. If you have a computer you can receive and decode all available channels including premium services if you have a suitable subscription card.

There are at least two methods to upgrade your computer for television reception. You can either use an internal radio/TV card or a small USB stick. Both hardware solutions work well and are not expensive. USB stick is more suitable for use with laptops but you can also use it with a desktop computer as a permanent solution. There are many different models that support different technologies. For terrestrial broadcasting in Europe and many other countries your device should support DVB-T. DVB-S in needed for satellite television and DVB-C for cable reception. Many cards and sticks also support analog FM radio and analog TV. Before you purchase such card or stick you should check which standards are used in your country.

Many internal cards have on-board audio/video decoding support. This hardware decoder does the work which is otherwise very time consuming and processor intensive. USB sticks have no hardware decoder, there is only a demodulator that supplies the DVB transport stream. While the main computer processor will have to decode the sound and picture, this is also an advantage. It is much easier and cheaper to update decoding software than to replace decoding hardware.

Most TV cards and sticks are provided with a remote control. It is very similar to the real TV remote control and enables you to turn your computer monitor into an advanced TV set. Every television decoding software allows you to display the TV picture over entire screen so you can enjoy as in front of standard TV set. The only disadvantage of this way of watching TV is that while you watch full-screen TV you can not use the computer for other work.

Receiving television channels with computer has also one big advantage. You can easily record any channel. You can also record one channel and watch a different one. This is all possible because the software is able to decode many different services simultaneously. Of course, this also depends on the speed of your processor, but in general recording of particular channel or entire stream is not a problem.

Digital television is much closer to computers than it was in the old analog days. Digital broadcasting uses codecs which have roots in computers. Watching television on the computer is nothing new. In fact, digital broadcasting is only a network of many dedicated computers and peripheral devices.