The US government has made it compulsory for all tv stations to broadcast only digital tv signals from 17 Feb 2009. Thus the analog tv transmission will be the thing of the past very soon. The digital language is the language of the pc. The technology was first used in the pcs and then extended as the tv broadcasting technology. The pc was not compatible with the analog technology. But it was always compatible with the digital technology. So getting the digital tv on pc is very easy technically.

It is easy to get digital tv on your pc. This means in future you may not require the stand alone tv at all. There are all types of digital signals everywhere. The computer is a very logical place for receiving and processing the digital signals. The DVD format is the digital video. Here again we are dealing with digital signals. There are digital signals from the satellite, from the cable, from the tv transmission stations. All the functions available on digital tv can be available on pc. The pc is capable of doing everything that the digital tv does.

In old days the pc did not have the capacity of processing power. They were not able to decode and play full motion digital video. Now that is not the case any more. The pc has full power of decoding and playing full motion video from the
Satellite or cable or terrestrial tv broadcasts

In the early days of the technology evolution it was necessary to install a tv capture card inside your pc. You had to open the pc completely and install this tv capture card inside it. This was not a difficult task. But this was certainly very clumsy and you did need some technical help. The notebook pcs were not available at that time. But it was not possible to use this tv capture card inside your notebook pcs. Whatever notebook pcs were available were extremely costly at that time. This procedure of installing tv capture card inside your pc is still used if you have old style pc.

The modern pcs have lot many new advantages. The modern pcs and notebook pcs support USB-2 interfaces. They are very fast and so can process digital video stream in real time. This means your pc can work as the digital tv also. The funny part is the cost of notebook pcs can be pretty low as compared to stand alone tv.

All that you have to do is plug in to your USB port. You can get local, cable or satellite digital tv signals processed on your pc. However it is not possible to use it for encrypted paid tv channels. You will have to buy a decoder and then feed the pc via USB analog video adapter to get paid channel on your pc.

In future computers will be used more as the tv also and stand alone tv may become a thing of the past.