COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Texas Instruments Inc. is adding two features to its mobile broadcast TV product not normally associated with handheld video viewing.

At this week's International Broadcasting Convention, TI will demonstrate personal video recorder (PVR) and picture-in-picture (PiP) capabilities using its Hollywood DTV1000 chip in conjunction with the OMAP 2430.

Simon Morris, business line manager for mobile broadcast at TI, said the advantage of offering the features is to achieve PVR and PiP capabilities without resorting to double- or triple-buffering—requiring large off-chip SRAM. TI is instead implementing software to operate within the primary 2-Mbit buffer memory of the Hollywood chip set.

"We expect to see the features offered by competing baseband and video players, but not at the footprint and power consumption we will demonstrate," Morris claimed.

While European mobile video trials during the 2006 World Cup revealed questionable consumer support for advanced features, Morris said demographic studies have identified consumer demand for some advanced features. PVR capabilities, for example, depending on system design, enable the recording of full-length TV shows on a handheld device using internal memory, Morris said.

A smaller embedded picture, even with the highest-resolution screens, isn't intended for observing detail, he added, but would allow users to track scene changes, alerting them to shift from one broadcast channel to another.

The software is ready to implement, and will be showing up in handhelds in 2007, Morris said.