Watching television on the PC is appealing for a few reasons. First, it means you do not have to buy a TV. It also saves space - rather than a large, heavy 36" box ten feet across the room, you can use your monitor two feet in front of you. Lastly, with the latest generation of TV tuner products, much functionality has been added that cannot be found on the common TV set.

We'd initially hoped for an integrated digital tuner, but unfortunately, ATI's DTV solution is still in the prototype phase, and not yet ready for production. Instead, the analog tuner included with the All-In-Wonder RADEON will have to suffice. With this proven technology comes a brand new list of features, though. We start with a basic TV tuner, capable of scanning 125 different channels. All of the features previously found on the All-In-Wonder series, such as zoom, Hot Words advanced close captioning, panning, and dbx stereo tuning are still available.

Additionally, ATI has added TV-ON-DEMAND, a technology that functions similarly to a Personal Digital Recorder. First, the user allocates a certain amount of hard drive space. Then, they configure the software to record at a given level of quality, depending on disk space available and desired image. When the phone rings, the mother-in-law pays a visit, or nature calls, pausing live TV is as simple as hitting the "Pause" button. ATI's software records in the background, so when you are ready to watch again, hit "Play." During commercials or those sappy parts in Top Gun, you can fast forward until the switch is made back over to the live broadcast.

To compliment the TV-ON-DEMAND feature, ATI has also included an interactive, free program guide, which provides complete program listings. This new software, called GUIDE+, will search and schedule programming based on title, category, actor or date, meaning you can schedule an episode of Friends (if you're into those types of shows) a week ahead of time and have your PC record it as an MPEG-2 file on your disk drive. According to ATI, a 5GB hard drive will hold seven hours of MPEG-1 quality video or three hours of MPEG-2. Since the quality of your recording will only be as good as the source, we've found MPEG-1 to be sufficient for recording from the TV.

Even though it seems counter-intuitive to test the TV tuner features of the All In Wonder with a TV, it should be noted that the All In Wonder offers many more features than the standard tuner found on most television sets. We had no problem connecting an antenna to the card and letting the software auto-scan for available channels. The quality was on par with what we would expect from a television tuner and the timeshifting feature worked great – we were able to pause Saturday Night Live, go out for desert, and finish the rest of the show 30 minutes later.