3 ms·

My phone has radio but no television reception. Is there some legality reason why phones don't have tv tuners?

• simcop2387 7y ago
  Maybe actually. In some jurisdictions this would require a license from the government to do the reception. The UK is like this with their tv licenses for the BBC and similar. I can't imagine theyre the only ones like this. And then there's possibly compression technologies that might need to be licensed from the mpeg group, etc.
  • xxpor 7y ago
    You'd also want a much better antenna than what you could fit in a phone.
• blihp 7y ago
  Setting aside legal/licensing issues, retrieving an MP2/MP4 (depending where in the world you are) stream via SDR would require massively more power both in terms of transferring the raw data to the CPU and processing to extract the signal from it. It also requires better hardware (IIRC ATSC, for example, requires >10-bit ADC while FM radio is fine with an 8-bit ADC.) So a SDR-based TV tuner would drain your phone battery quite quickly and still not work as well as a dedicated TV tuner streamed to your phone. If that weren't enough, there's also the fact that the digital TV signals don't work well with moving antennas on the receiving end...
• rurounijones 7y ago
  Some phones in Japan did (and maybe still do) have TV tuners even in the pre-smartphone days.
  • dTal 7y ago
    I swear I saw a keychain TV (VHF) on something like Banggood once, for a couple dozen bucks. Really wish I'd bought it for the novelty value, as I can't find it at all now. It would have been a remarkable example of technology reaching a peak immediately before it goes obsolete. edit: Holy shit, I found it! It's a Mytech MT-010. Can be had for 20 bucks, if it ships to you at all.
    • cellular 7y ago
      Cool, I'll check it out. I still have a Sony watchman. But it can't decode the new signals of course.