Yes, with PADS you can simply show live TV in several ways.
PADS supports analog TV as well as all forms of digital TV: by satellite (DVB-S), by cable (DVB-C) and terrestrial (DVB-T).
When you want to have the possibility to show a different TV channel per PADS Viewer you can best choose to equip each Viewer PC with its own TV card and connect it to your TV circuit. Next you can use the standard TV element of PADS to simply configure when and on which part of the screen you like to show your selected TV channel. Beside TV shots you can also show teletext pages in this way.
For analog TV Net Display Systems recommends TV cards of Hauppauge. For digital TV you can in principle choose any TV card. We do advise though to consult us in advance to check if the specific card is already known or requires some additional configuration settings. There are also so-called Hybrid cards that support both analog and digital TV. These cards are supported by PADS too.
When using a TV card we advise you to place the same TV card in your PADS Designer PC. By this when designing your presentation you can already see what the result will be.
If you don’t have the possibility to provide each Viewer PC with a TV card you can also choose for streaming. With streaming you will receive the TV signal at a central location where it is converted into a video stream that is broadcasted over the network.
The application of streaming of course leads to an increased network load. However when you choose for UDP streaming the stream is only broadcasted once over the network and all PADS Viewers that are subscribed to this stream will pick up the signal. As a result the network load will be relatively low.
