Watching Antenna (OTA) TV on a Phone / Computer Screen

05 Feb 2022

5-minute read

TL;DR

If you’re already watching over-the-air (OTA) TV and want to use your phone or laptop as a standalone TV screen as well, you can buy a network-attached TV tuner – e.g. from HDHomeRun or Hauppauge – and connect it to your ethernet router.

Who is this for?

You:

  • want to use your phone, laptop, or any other internet-connected device as a TV screen. In other words, you want to watch content typically only available on your TV.
  • are NOT someone who has cable service that provides an online streaming service for free.
  • have an ethernet router at home (technically, you don’t even need internet service).

Making use of non-TV device screens

When I moved into my last apartment, I wanted to keep my unintentional “cord-cutting” lifestyle while still being able to watch football for free on CBS, FOX, and NBC. I always hated the idea of finding an illegal stream to do this on my computer, main because the quality is terrible and there’s a ton of lag. These broadcasts are usually free anyways if you own a OTA TV tuner and a TV or computer monitor, so I initially just settled on hooking up an OTA TV tuner to my external computer monitor.

However, I was always bothered by the fact that the built-in screen on my laptop or phone couldn’t be hooked up to the TV tuner: wouldn’t it be great if you could use a device’s built-in screen as a standalone monitor and use it like a TV surface?

Barebones approach (<$100)

If you Google “ota tv on laptop”, the most commonly suggested solution is to get a USB TV tuner (or card) to plug directly into your laptop. But this means that the USB TV Tuner must be attached to the device which contains the screen you want to watch on – you probably don’t want to do this if you want the capability to watch on your phone. Also, this approach also doesn’t scale well since a single USB TV tuner only enables watching OTA TV on a single device.

Full commitment ($100-$200+)

Once you get a device from HDHomeRun, Hauppauge, or some other manufacturer, you get a couple of advantages over a plug-in USB tuner:

  • You can watch OTA TV on any home network-connected device with a screen (rather than being relegated to a TV + OTA Antenna combo). In other words, you can decouple the tuner hardware from the device that you want to watch OTA content on. This makes it easy to watch OTA content across different devices. Instead of having to move a USB TV tuner to device you want to watch OTA TV on, you can leave an OTA TV tuner plugged into your router.
  • You don’t need to buy an antenna for each screen you want to watch OTA TV on. Instead, you only need to connect a single antenna to your OTA TV tuner. The actual number of tuners in your OTA TV tuner corresponds to the number of devices that can independently watch an OTA channel. For instance, once the HDHomeRun Flex 4K is connected to a single OTA antenna, its four (4) tuners enable up to four (4) devices to each tune into a different channel.

On a side note, among those pursuing home entertainment systems, there seems to be a huge information gap between beginners and the folks at Reddit’s r/PleX. It’s not only hard for beginners to know that this is the type of forum that they should look for, but also hard for beginners to understand what’s going on in the sub-reddit and ask anything beyond a “help me” post even when they’re already there. But if you’re curious about cord-cutting, remote streaming, personal content libraries (akin to a self-hosted Netflix), and other DIY home entertainment-network combo projects, r/PleX is still the best place to start at.