picoStick USB Digital TV tuner is insanely small, but only in Europe

It's not like we've ever felt particularly overwhelmed by the size or heft of the USB digital TV tuners already on the market, but Hauppauge's latest has us feeling positively overwhelmed at the thought of lugging one of those other, nearly credit card-sized behemoths ever again. The PCTV Systems picoStick, launched at PlayBite 2009 in London today, is being billed as the world's smallest DVB-T (Western Europe) tuner, requires no antenna, costs £50 (about $83) and should be available from Amazon.co.uk and Play.com next week. One more pic after the break.

[Via Richard Lai]

[(Unverified) Posted Sep 16th 2009 8:20PM]

"picoStick USB Digital TV tuner is insanely small, but only in Europe"

Does it grow bigger if you put it in your bag and cross the ocean?

[deathtrap3000 Posted Sep 16th 2009 8:58PM]

Here in the uk, unless you are standing under an mast, you will need a proper antenna.

[kingu Posted Sep 16th 2009 9:14PM]

Is this DVB-T mpeg2 or mpeg4?

[DrXym Posted Sep 17th 2009 3:14AM]

I have an HVR-900 USB stick which is supposedly MPEG 2 only but can actually decode AVC by using dvbviewer. I expect these devices will handle anything shoved into the transport stream even if Hauppage's software does not. Most modern USB tuners do officially support AVC though.

[DrXym Posted Sep 17th 2009 3:01AM]

The sad part is Hauppage's PVR software is abysmal. It's bloated, sluggish, unintuitive, and has a UI wildy at odds with windows user interface guidelines and completely lacking any self-consistency. What's the point of producing cute hardware if the software it needs to work royally sucks?