Semiconductor dealer SkyTune has introduced a new chip to enable TV reception on home PCs.

The SKY951VP can pass uncompressed digital video, audio, and data streams to a PCI bus, and digital video streams to a video input port for VGA cards. Because it contains analog NTSC, PAL, and Secam decoders, the chip can be designed into analog tuner cards.

SkyTune hopes the chip will appeal to PC OEMs and add-in card retailers looking for low-cost TV-tuner implementations.

While analog TV tuner cards will be the largest initial application of the SKY951VP, company officials say it opens up an opportunity to enable a home PC to cache TV programs and broadband Web information onto its hard disk.

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