On Fri, 21 Nov 2003 07:46:35 -0600, Do What?
wrote:

Good question, given that entire cable-ready tuner systems are being slapped
onto PC video cards by ATI, Asus, and a number of smaller manufacturers.

Exactly my thoughts w/ the basic cable subscriptions. A simple cable
tv tuner card can be had for around $25.
El cheapo vcrs can be had for around that price as well... so the
tuner itself coulnd't have been costly to include, but woulda been a
nice feature to some, even if redundant to most.

You have to look at *need*.

There's no perceived need by the consumer - no demand for the feature.
They don't have to pay for a basic cable box. If they *did*, that
would be a different story and it probably *would* have been included
in the feature set.

For those who don't have cable (a fairly small subset of the market),
they didn't demand such a feature since they already had to decide
which of the existing tuners to use. And some of *those* people
without cable probably didn't even use their receivers.

Remember that receivers came to AV rather late in the game. By that
time, most people already had the hookups that they wanted. Sure, they
could audio and video over as passthrough items in their receivers
(many of them probably had already moved audio over), but they were
probably already used to having to switch from VCR to TV or switch
inputs on their TV.