Was in town today and looking through The Good Guys and saw an Elgato EyeTV DTT USB stick for $145.00.  Having previously configured TV cards on both Windows and Linux, I wondered how things would be on my MacBook.

The reputation of Apple Products to “just work” would possibly be put to the test with these as TV cards or USB TV sticks can be a bit of a pain to configure and get running, particularly under Linux depending on the relevant chipset of the card.

Still, after speaking to one of the guys there who had a Mac and also one of these little sticks, he assured me that they worked just fine so long as you plug in your aerial cable to the stick as Cairns has less than great reception for TV, which does not appear to be getting a boost any times soon.  This appears to be more to the point of being caused by the surrounding mountains than anything else.

After getting a reduction of $10.00 off the cost down to $135.00 I walked out with a USB TV stick which I was a bit skeptical of but quietly confident of getting to work.

After getting home I fired up the Mac and put everything together, hoping that the little aerial would pick up some stations so as I didn’t have to go searching for a coax cable for reception.  Unfortunately, as I expected, there was no joy with the little aerial and no stations wee picked up when running the configuration utility after installing the software, so off to get a bit of coax I went and retrieved a cable form my old Windows PC.

On plugging the coax in, and re-running the signal detection, 25 stations were detected including 3 or so radio connections.  All the HD free to air channels were found as were the ones that had been notoriously hard to get in channels 9 and 10.  I was glad that the new OneHD channel was also detected as well as it screens some great sport from time to time.

I then started flicking through all the channels and found that reception was great and that the interface on the supplied software was just as easy to use and get an understanding on.

Compared to configuring a TV card / stick on Windows or Linux this was so easy it wasn’t funny!

I sat and watched 25 minutes of the 2009 NRL Grand Final and there were only a few stutters with the broadcast; this was more due to signal quality than anything else as we regularly get this sort of thing on the Sony TV that we have as well.

If you’re also looking to get TV on your Mac then I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this product to you as I had no issues and if you live in an area where you an get a good strong TV signal then the supplied little aerial may work with no issues – it would be great if it did!  Still, if you are like me then so long as you have some coax that you can plug into an aerial socket then you will be good to go and should also have no problems.