Mobile TV
Oct 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Carolyn Schuk
New solutions signal a fresh start for the stalled PCTV market.
MaxLinear’s configurable MxL5007T PCTV tuner chip supports terrestrial TV standards, including ATSC, DVB-T, DVB-H and DTMB.
Television by way of personal computers (PCTV) is the TV industry's Rodney Dangerfield; it just gets no respect. In January, Junko Yoshida wrote on www.wirelessnetdesignline.com that adding a broadcast TV receiver to portable gadgets seems superfluous when young people watch what they want, when they want via the Internet.
While the laptop seems like a natural fit for mobile TV, PCTV has been the industry stepchild. One reason is mobile phone TV's reigning position as media darling, sucking up all the air in the room for other mobile devices. A second reason is the limitations of last-generation technology: Bulky external tuners and antennas simply use too much power.
For example, one PC mobile TV solution introduced last year has, in addition to a TV tuner card, six components, two software CDs and a user manual. If broadcast TV made similar demands on early viewers, we'd still be listening to “The Ipana Troubadours” on the crystal set.
But the past two years witnessed a virtuous circle unfolding with the potential to rouse PCTV from its market inertia.
The third screen
First, the availability of live Olympics coverage on mobile TV services introduced many people to the third screen. Second, the ultra-portable and ultra-cheap Netbook equipped folks with another always-with-you device — one featuring a bigger screen than a phone.
“The use model has completely changed,” says Telegent Systems PCTV product manager Sanjay Noronha. “The form factor is so intuitive, light and small that people take them along all the time.”
The right technology to perfect this alchemy started falling into place last year with a critical mass of suppliers launching new low-power, sub-$5 TV tuner chips, enhancing existing tuners for new markets, and (most important of all) signing OEM deals that will build the tuners into new laptops and Netbooks in the same way as Wi-Fi cards and DVD players.
In 2008, Telegent introduced the TLG2300 chip, which integrates everything — demodulator; decoder; DSP; stereo FM radio; high-speed USB peripheral; and a DVB-T, PAL, SECAM and NTSC tuner — into a standard 10mm chip. This design offers a large reduction in board space and cuts power requirements 75 percent, according to Noronha.
Telegent’s TLG2300 PCTV tuner integrates a demodulator, decoder, DSP, stereo FM radio, high-speed USB peripheral into a standard 0.4in chip.
“You can watch TV on a Netbook for about three hours before draining the battery,” Noronha says.
Antennas are another challenge for PCTV, Noronha says.
“Without a receiver that's very, very sensitive, it's been hard to integrate TV into the laptop, so you had to carry around an antenna,” Noronha says. “We engineered the solution for very high sensitivity to enable the adoption of internal antennas. We have direct conversion architecture, and our DSP algorithms greatly increase sensitivity and mobility.”
Last June, Telegent joined forces with Topstar Digital Technologies to deliver TV-enabled Netbooks and PCs that receive both free-to-air terrestrial analog TV and digital (DVB-T) signals. Both PC and Netbook designs will be available in mass production later this year. Recently unveiled at Computex in Taiwan, Topstar's 18in all-in-one PC was designed from the ground up for hybrid TV, with the entire system optimized for TV performance.
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