TV Option.....

[rodybmw]

Hi guys......sorry for not responding to the many posts here, but unfortunately I haven't had any time to spend on message boards for a long time now. If I did have any new information though I would have posted it here by now....but I don't.

My contact at BMW AG seems to have disappeared. I have tried to contact her for months and there is no response. Here are a few points to summarize what I think about the TV option for US E70's:

--The TV retrofit option that my contact at BMW AG was referring to last year is the analog TV tuner, which even if it is able to receive NTSC signals (US TV standard) it will be of no use in a couple of months when all analog broadcasts in the US are ended (by law) in favor of all digital broadcasts. Besides, I highly doubt that the US dealer's can program the car to enable the tuner once it's installed....that is if it's even possible to do that on US cars. It's not like the E53 where the TV retrofit module was plug-n-play.

--The digital TV box that is available for the E70 in other countries will not work with US digital broadcasts (as far as I've heard), but I don't have any confirmation of this. Also, my now missing contact at BMW AG was telling me last year that in order to even install the digital TV box (DVB-T) the car needs to already have the TV option installed.....which brings us back to whether the US dealers can program the TV option as mentioned above AND then install and program the DVB-T box.

So as far as I'm concerned there are too many unknowns to even attempt to spend a lot of money to see if it'll work in the US:

1. We don't know if the US dealers can program the TV retrofit kit and the DVB-T box.....or for that matter if it's even possible to program it on US model cars.

2. Even if the US dealers attempt and are successfully at programing the units, there is no guarantee that they will work with US broadcast standards.

So at this point I have abandoned attempting the TV retrofit on the E70. If I find out any more information I will post it here. If I don't post anything new then I don't have any more information on the subject.

Hopefully someone else will have more concrete answers than what I wrote above, but that's all I know about the subject.

[X5 Meister]

Thanks very kindly for the follow-up!