Many of us spend hours working on a PC, and sometimes the tasks are monotonous and may not require our full attention. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to watch TV while you work? Since your PC is probably not in the same room as your television, being able to watch TV on your computer can be very handy. It also saves people from having to buy a separate TV if they already have a PC. There are four main ways you can enjoy watching TV on your PC so let’s take a look.
Here in the UK most of the big television channels have their own websites. Following the incredible success of BBC iPlayer many of them have chosen to follow suit and offer shows as free streams you can watch in your browser. BBC iPlayer basically offers a variety of BBC shows from the last seven days as free streams. The technology works well, it works in any browser, and the quality is reasonably good. It is also completely advert free.
Channel 4 offer a service called 4OD, and they actually made whole series of some of their most popular shows available. You can watch several episodes of things like Father Ted for completely free via your browser. Unfortunately on 4OD there are adverts but far less than you would find on traditional broadcast television. ITV and Channel 5 have belatedly followed suit with their own websites offering a range of repeated shows as free streams.
This is definitely the easiest way to watch TV on your PC as it requires no equipment or software. However you are limited to the selection available on the websites, and the shows only appear there after they have aired on scheduled broadcast TV.
Perhaps the simplest way to watch TV on your PC is actually to buy an LCD TV which can double up as a computer monitor. The vast majority of LCD TVs nowadays have ports so you can hook them up to your computer and use them as monitors. They also tend to have built in TV tuners and all you need to do is plug in an aerial. They will tend to be a bit more expensive than stand alone computer monitors, but you won’t have to buy any additional hardware or software for your computer and the picture quality is likely to be better. Using an LCD TV as a computer monitor is a good solution.
These are small devices that work in exactly the same way as internal TV tuners. The only difference is that you plug them into the PC and then plug an aerial into the device. You’ll need to install software and that’s it, you can watch TV on your PC. I used a Hauppauge device for a while before digital and the picture quality was very poor. They have been improved in recent years but make sure you check what resolution the device can handle. An external device will cost slightly more than an internal one.