ATSC Tuners

As a result of the tuner mandate the USA, most new TVs come with a built-in ATSC tuner. This makes it hard to make like for like comparisons between the prices of DTT receivers in the US, compared to, say, Europe. There doesn't seem to be a big market for standalone ATSC receivers, so perhaps price comparisons aren't really worthwhile anyway.

Still, I did a bit of searching to find prices and it seems to me that a basic ATSC set-top box is coming in at around US$ 80 - 90. Try this box from Kworld, for example.

I'll look at this a bit more in the coming weeks and maybe try comparing the prices of TVs with integrated digital tuners.

There's no doubt, however, that the stand alone set-top box seems, currently at least, to be more popular for DVB-T than for ATSC. Of course this has an impact on the prices for such devices, pushing them down all the time.