Watching Free to Air TV on Your iPad

Date Posted:30 December 2012 

Thanks to the new IDTV tuner, everyone is now watching free to air TV on iPad. On the train in the morning, you’ll often hear snippets of ABC News coming from several parts of the carriage at once. At work, you might catch a colleague watching a rerun of Hogan’s Heroes in their cubicle, and on the train home, Spicks and Specks can invariably be heard reliving the music of the ‘60s.

The new IDTV is a mini set top box about the size of a 10-cent piece. It plugs into your iPhone 4S, new iPad or iPad 2 and requires no Internet connection to operate. You just plug it in, download the free IDTV app from the iTunes store, scan in your channels and you’re in business.

The IDTV tuner can pick up all Australian SD free-to-air TV channels and digital radio as well. You can pause and rewind live TV and record your favourite programs and there’s an electronic program guide included with the app. It also comes with its own battery for up to eight hours of viewing time and a choice of three different antennas for different situations. The new IDTV tuner sells for less than $100, which is why everybody’s now watching TV on the go.

And now there’s another device you can use to make your viewing experience even better: the iFlashDrive HD. It’s a portable storage solution for iPads, iPods and iPhones that lets you copy, swap, save, play and back up files between multiple devices.

This pocket-sized drive is the only one that is compatible with both iOS and Mac/PC and it lets you share files without the need for iCloud or Wi-Fi. So if there’s something on free-to-air TV you want to share with your friends or work colleagues and huddling around your iPad for a better view doesn’t quite cut it, the iFlashDrive HD is a must. It allows you to plug your iPad into the nearest Mac or PC and share the TV program with everyone on a much larger screen.

The iFlashDrive comes with both a USB connector and a 30-pin dock connector for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, so you can perform a two-way data transfer between any iOS device and a Mac or PC.

It’ll open any file supported by iOS devices, including:

  • doc files such as HTML, keynotes, numbers, pages, PDF, PPT, DOC, XLS and RTF
  • video files such as MPV, M4V, MOV, MP4
  • audio files such as MP3, CAF, AAC, WAV, AIFF and M4A
  • pic files such as BMP, TIF, TIFF, XMB, GIF, ICO, CUR, JPG and PNG.

It includes a free app from iTunes and cloud storage support for over 30 file formats, and it’s available in 8, 16, 32 and 64GB capacities.

Starting from under $100, the iFlashDrive HD is a very handy gadget to add to your portable arsenal and a great way to optimise your free-to-air TV viewing experience.