Sapphire has just announced a brand-new product that should solve the problem of not being able to take TV with you when you're on the go.
The Sapphire HD 5570 XtendTV combines a 1GB Radeon HD 5570 GPU with a TV-tuner into a single-slot graphics card that should fit nicely into a HTPC. Obviously this gives you a nice bit of graphical-oomph, as well as the ability to receive free-to-air TV and radio stations through a regular aerial, then use your PC to watch and record the programmes.
Although at launch it'll only be able to receive DVB-T signals - that's Freeview to the rest of us - we were told at CES that all of the decoding work is done in software by Mirics FlexiTV, which uses the GPU to do all of the hard work. This means that - in theory - support for other signals can be added at a later date, including DVB-T2 and DVB-S, meaning that high-def content should be available in the future.
So far this sounds a bit like the old ATI All-in-Wonder cards, but XtendTV has one more trick up its sleeve. By installing the Mirics FlexiStream software, the PC will turn into a streaming server that can send live TV to anywhere with an internet connection. Using the GPU to compress the signal, it's also possible to send a smooth stream over the net without the need for a super-high bandwidth connection at either end.
Although there's only a PC client available at the moment, Sapphire is apparently working on mobile apps that should let you stream TV to all sorts of devices.
We had a chance to check out XtendTV while we were at CES, and managed to watch the good old BeeBeeCee streaming from a PC in the UK to a hotel suite in Las Vegas without so much as a hiccup.
Unfortunately there are no details on pricing or availability, but home-theatre fans should expect to see Sapphire's HD 5570 XtendTV soon.
