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Because while you won't need an external unit for the tuner anymore, you would still need one for the battery.

This isn't true.

Smartwatches have had full HD h.264 and 720p h.265 hardware decode since at least 2014.

They do, but how many viewing hours do you get from a single battery charge?

The decoding is probably in the same order of magnitude as listening to music from your watch.

The screen brightness is the limiting factor. Based on always-on displays on the Apple Watch you are probably looking at 8 hours or so?

So decoding with the screen on might be 5 hours?

The always-on display drops power usage by being quite dim and reducing the update frequency to 1 Hz. 24-60 Hz video will draw way more power

Why would it need more battery than any smartwatch?

Decoding video is a power intensive operation. DTV broadcasts use modern codecs like H.264, H.265, and MPEG-2.

With proper hardware decoding it should be less power intensive than using aarch64.

Display also drains battery when playing a video. Recent displays for smart watch have low power mode when the content is not changed.