Article
Mohu Developing Streaming Set-Top Box With TV Tuner | Tom’s Guide
My Comments
The US market is heading towards the concept of “cord-cutting” where they abandon traditional cable or satellite pay-TV for regular broadcast TV augmented with online TV services. This combination of services would typically be provided through the use of the TV’s internal ATSC tuner connected to an antenna (aerial) and a video peripheral such as a Blu-Ray player, games console or network media adaptor that has access to the online services such as Hulu, Netflix or Amazon On Demand.
But if they wanted a “one-unit, one-remote” solution, they would need to purchase a smart TV which has the necessary front-ends for the online services. For those of us who keep an existing TV going, Mohu are intending to field to that market a digital-TV set-top box which connects to an antenna and the home network to gain access to local free-to-air TV and the online video services. Here, you can gain back the ability to watch TV using the one “clicker” and this set-top box can pass through HDTV signals to HDMI-equipped flatscreens or projectors from the free-to-air and online services.
I would like to be sure that this device also uses composite video connections so that it can work effectively with those legacy CRT TVs that haven’t been thrown out as well as being part of the DLNA Home Media Network, whether as a media player or controllable media renderer. This would be important if you do download content to your NAS and play this on your TV.
The concept can be expanded on with a DVR function so that TV shows can be recorded off-the-air and watched without ads or as a DVB-T-based variant for Europe, Australia and other countries that use this standard.
At least this helps the people who want to move away or keep away from cable TV still have the benefits of a set-top solution that integrates both free-to-air and online content.
