Getting streaming TV on your phone or tablet is great. You get to watch TV anywhere. However, if you’re out of the house and you don’t have a clever DVR or set-top box that’ll squirt the TV picture from your aerial to your device over your WiFi, you’re going to be using data.
Oh my days. Data is a precious commodity nowadays. Once we all had oodles of data but now there’s a bit of a premium on high data usage. Plus, if you’re going to be watching high quality streaming TV you’re at the mercy of the network coverage, throttling, congestion and b..uffeeerrriinngg…
An alternative is this thing, which picks up the digital TV signals that are washing around this great nation of ours. Then it gets squirted into a WiFi hotspot for you to join onto with your smartphone or tablet and watch the resulting video. It’s a battery-powered tuner with an aerial that lets you watch outside of your home via the on-device WiFi hotspot, but there’s also a “home network setting” so it can become part of your home WiFi. This means you can still browse the internet whilst watching TV.
There’s two models – the mains tuner (£64.99) which turns your tablet into an additional screen and a portable version (£69.99) which you can slot into your pocket. Get it on the TabletTV website or the mighty Amazon and then you and your friends can laugh hysterically at your tablet screen just like absolutely nobody ever does…
It’s not just a tuner though. It’ll also let you record TV shows and then play them back anytime. Great for long journeys or if you’re going abroad and you want to take a bit of TV from home. No buffering, no internet needed. Boom.