HDTV Anywhere
A company called CrestaTech has used IDF to springboard its new CrestaTV "universal broadband television receiver", a programmable broadband technology which the company is hoping OEMs will bung into PCs to transform us all into mobile couch potatoes.
The chip supports all analog TV and digital TV standards worldwide and combines a programmable RF IC with software that allows it to receive live analog or digital TV as well as radio and GPS signals anywhere in the world, so OEMs don't have to ship different region-specific chips. The multi-threaded signal processing software can apparently support frequencies from 45Mhz to 1Ghz and CrestaTech is also boasting flexibility in the fact it can come on a PCI express card for desktops, mini PCI express cards or even USB TV modules for laptops.
The company's CEO, George Haber, told HEXUS he hoped his chip would turn PCs into "truly mobile media centres." But would people really rather watch live TV (and by that we mean the fairly rubbish, free, public TV channels one can pick up anywhere) than, say, YouTube? Haber says yes, and told HEXUS there would even be the possibility of uploading the live TV to YouTube, although the reason anyone would want to do so is slightly beyond us.
Of course, watching TV on a computer is not exactly a novelty, ATI's Theater HD 750 PC TV chip also allows PCs to receive live HDTV, but that chip is geo-specific.
