Xbox One Digital TV Tuner Priced And Dated For UK

Blair Inglis 18 Comments

Xbox One owners in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain will soon be able to use the system’s TV functionality with the release of the Digital TV Tuner this October. It will be priced at £24.99.

The device will add HD Freeview functionality, and you’ll even be able to control the TV and select channels with the sound of your voice through Kinect, or watch TV in Snap Mode while playing a game. The full feature list is below:

  • Watch HD TV on Xbox One: With the Xbox One Digital TV Tuner, you can watch free-to-air DVB-T, DVB-T2 and DVB-C television channels without changing TV inputs. You can receive game invitations and notifications while watching TV and even watch TV while you wait for a multiplayer match to start.
  • TV Viewing in Snap Mode: You can watch TV using the Snap mode, watching TV on the side and leaving the main screen for games, Skype, or other applications.
  • Pause Live TV: Pause your favorite show when you get up to take a break.
  • TV Listings in the OneGuide: TV listings will be available in the OneGuide. From anywhere, say “Xbox show guide, what’s on BBC One?” to quickly navigate directly to that channel’s listings*.
  • Favorite Channels in the OneGuide: Create your own personal Favorites in the OneGuide so you can easily choose what you want to watch.
  • Channel Tuning by Voice: The OneGuide allows you to call out your favorite TV channel by name and start watching it instantly*.
  • The OneGuide on Xbox SmartGlass: Now you have access to the full OneGuide on the new Xbox SmartGlass app with the ability to tune channels on your TV.
  • TV On Demand: TV listings in the OneGuide will indicate which shows are available on demand from video apps.

Sounds like a neat bit of kit, is it worth £24.99 or do you think it should come as standard?

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18 Comments

  1. Damn that’s good…

    • Welcome to 2007…. PS3 PlayTV box all over again.

      • PlayTV without recording DVR functionality it seems…

      • Play TV could do split screen could it?

  2. If it had this at launch then it really would have been an all-in-one box. Still, a great piece of kit for the price, considering you’d be lucky to get a hd box for that price.

    Doesn’t mention if it can record? I understand that this would need RAM and HDD access which is probably not available. A pity.

    • No more RAM and HDD access that recording game video. DVR functionality is all software, so can be added down the line, but (even considering the TV pause cunftion) it’s more complex than finding a mature chipset and driver stack that they can drop into the Windows 8 side of things, which is probably why it’s not there right away.

      What’s more troublesome is the lack of a coaxial passthrough, so that this can be used on the way to the back of your TV.

      • It’s the same issue though with passthrough for HDMI – not everyone wants to run their sky box and their xbox at the same time

      • Thanks for the reply. I’m assuming that if it does get record function then it will not be able to be used while recording game footage, and vice versa.

      • Yeah, that’s pretty likely. It depends on how intensive it is on the system reserved CPU time, so there’s maybe a very slight chance for it with a second HDD plugged in, but I’d say that’s very doubtful and not allowing the player to record gameplay when the DVR is active is by far the most likely situation.

  3. Come on Sony, where’s Play TV 2?

  4. “watch TV while you wait for a multiplayer match to start.”

    C’est incroyable

  5. Will the voice commands still work without kinnect (for the kinnect-less bundles)?

    • I presume they’ll patch in the ability to use any microphone – unless Kinect is responsible for processing the input as well as being the input device.

  6. Smart, but no DVR? Seems like a missed opportunity. Whatever happened to the PSX? Now that was a machine and a half.

  7. Seems like a great bit of kit. “Pause Live TV” seems to suggest the system can record TV to some extent.

  8. I’m still not convinced that I would ever want to watch telly whilst playing games. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

    • surprisingly i have found the tv option useful as the kids play on fifa. you do need to be pretty close to the tv but find it more useful than i imagined.

  9. Hope it supports dvb-s2 (freesat has some s2 channels) Also hope it gets hacked soon as I could use a cheap tuner for my media center.

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