Pinnacle Tiny picoStick USB TV Brings Channels While You're Surfing

The PCTV picoStick is a tiny, almost nano-sized DVB-T TV tuner launched today. DVB is growing in its adoption throughout the world, but DVB-T is only widely used in Western Europe. For signal reception, the picoStick comes with an MCX connector and an a small telescoping flip antenna, which can be attached to the device itself or by cable to a free standing antenna stand. Pinnacle's TVCenter 6 adds DVR and time-shifting software for recording shows for later watching. Recordings can be saved in MPEG-2, DivX (off-line transcoding) or H.264 formats for permanent collections or transfer to other devices. They also included some additional software for video editing.

Although only available for Windows XP, Vista and 7, special attention has been paid to making this a low-power CPU, netbook friendly nano device. This is reflected in their hardware requirements minimum being listed as Intel 1.6GHZ Atom and 256MB of RAM. This tiny unit will go on sale next week but only in Europe for around $80. No hint of an ASTC version is mentioned so we are still stuck with these USB TV dongles for the time being.