Quote:
Originally Posted by be236
How does that unit with TVGuide get its TVGuide programming, since it's free... does it just download the TV guide that's available from each channel/station and just aggregates them?
Also, what about the sensitivity of these Tuners, as compared with ATSC tuners lauded in newer Sony, LG , and Samsung TVs?
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Actually, you are talking about two different things, but both are free.
TV Guide On Screen is transmitted by most PBS stations along with one or more select commercial stations.
TVGoS is also transmitted by the
TV Guide channel on many cable systems. Irrespective of its source, your
TVGoS stream provides a complete listing of all programming, both broadcast and cable, for your area. The ATSC
Programming and System Information Protocol (
PSIP) is part of the ATSC digital broadcast standard. It provides a standard protocol for each broadcast stream to include a program schedule. Support for PSIP is spotty on both the broadcaster side and the TV set manufacturer side. Where properly implemented, an ATSC receiver may aggregate the PSIP schedules from each available subchannel and use them to construct a nice program listing. The result is not as nice as
TVGoS, but it should be more up-to-date. It will also include only those channels that you actually receive because the information comes from the channels that you receive.
The bottomline is that digital program listings are free discounting the fact that you have to buy [or rent] the device that generates them. It is misleading to claim that a particular manufacturer supplies free lifetime TV Guide listings. No one offers this as a paid service.