Finding a compelling reason to fork out for a PC TV card at a time when the Internet is streaming more and more television content is turning into a tricky task. Thus, products such as the PCTV nanoStick solo from Pinnacle (and you can blame the company for the erratic use of capitalistion) are increasing throwing several perks in our direction to make things more tempting.

Firstly, then, the nanoStick is small. It's about double the size of your standard USB flash drive still, but it's a compact product for the kind of job it used to take a PCI card to undertake. Secondly, it's cheap. This one can easily be picked up for under £30. And thirdly, it's bundled with some decent software to try to sweeten the deal.

Here you get a few bits and pieces on the set-up disc. Firstly, there's the standard driver set-up and TVCenter application. There's also DistanTV (for picking up your digital tuner through another PC), the TV Digital OnGuide programme-watching planner and the Edit TV tool for making your own sporting highlights (cunningly accounting for the 'sports' stamp on the box). The installation will also put the DivX 6.6 codec on your PC if it's not already there. For some reason, both your first and last names are required, incidentally, during the install of the TVCenter package.

Once it's up and running, then you need to have the USB device inserted, and at the end of it there's a port for a standard aerial, from which it can read digital and analogue signals. If you're not plugging the device into your main roof antenna, then Pinnacle does supply a small portable one in the package (albeit without the useful magentised base that it's offered in the past).

However, not for the first time, such a minuscule aerial proved pretty useless in our tests. A full channel scan brought back no workable channels at all, and we repeated this test in several locations. We were left to conclude that the portable antenna was simply a waste of time.

Thus, the PCTV product in this instance is best suited for someone at a fixed PC within reach of a better aerial, which surely somehow defeats the object of it. Granted, if you're looking for a simple, cheap way to get broadcast telly into your computer, and you don't mind hooking your nanoStick solo up to the main antenna, then you're in business (and in this instance, the hardware and software offer good value). Yet this is surely pitched as a convenient, portable way to watch TV when away from a fixed machine, and we can't help but think it doesn't meet that goal.

Furthermore, in many cases it might just simply be easier to stream content directly from the many channels that offer such a service, and leave a product such as the nanoStick - which seems to have become outdated very quickly - firmly on the shelf.

Verdict
A product that appears to be decreasingly relevant in the modern IT world. In some specific circumstances it might be useful, but this type of product in general is being rapidly marginalised by Internet TV.

Company: Pinnacle Systems

Tags: television universal serial bus tv tuner card personal computer antenna usb flash drive conventional pci hardware