When it comes to watching TV on your computer, you can go down one of two roads: the hardware one or the software one. If you take the hardware road, what you’re going to buy is called a TV-PC tuner card. This comes either as a card that you install inside your computer that creates an external socket for your TV aerial, or as a USB device that will happily plug into the outside of your machine. This will allow you to receive television signals directly to your computer, and is handy for someone who has recording options on their computer that they can use for television content. This option, however, will not allow you to get any TV content that you are not already getting or entitled to either through a paid subscription service of free public television content.
If you take the software road, you are entering the land of “Internet television,” which is at once a land of promise and a land of confusion. Here’s what it entails:
1) There is plenty of free stuff available legally online by way of video clips and streaming content. This stuff can be anything from an amateur video on You Tube to streaming news clips associated with a...