by ·Comments Off on HDHomeRun throws its hat in OTA DVR ring
A computer screen showing how HDHomeRun's proposed DVR might look

How HDHomeRun’s proposed DVR might look

Just when I think I’ve caught up on all of the news about DVRs for over-the-air TV, something new comes up. In this case, two somethings.

Over at Dave Zatz’s amazing blog, Zatz Not Funny!, Zatz broke the news that TiVo was pitching its service in a special email to former Aereo customers. (Or at least to some of them. I’m a former Aereo subscriber and I never saw it. But I digress.) TiVo, which purchased the Aereo’s customer list during the latter’s bankruptcy sale, offered its Roamio OTA DVR plus its Stream unit for sending a TV stream outside the home network plus its guide service, all for $19.95/month for two years. After those two years, guide service is $14.95/month, a cost that’s head and shoulders above any other OTA DVR.

I have so many happy menus of TiVo, which was my first DVR. The peanut-shaped remote felt great in my hand. The DVR filled any empty space by quietly recording shows I might like. The TiVo’s great design gave it unmatched, pioneering usability. Its monthly guide fee was a little high, but a lifetime subscription took away some of the sting.

Now the TiVo still offers a great user experience, but I can’t recommend that deal. Subtract the guide price and you’re paying only $120 over two years for hardware that’s worth twice that, but spending almost $180/year for guide data will get old fast.

Let’s turn from the original DVR to the newest – so new that it isn’t here yet. Silicondust, the makers of HDHomeRun, the amazing little OTA tuner for home networks, has launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund its own DVR. Based on that Kickstarter page, the HDHomeRun DVR will allow recording to an always-on PC or a network attached storage (NAS) drive. Adding the NAS capability should reduce electricity consumption compared to, for example, my HDHomeRun-connected Windows Media Center PC.

Guide data will cost a reasonable $30/year, and Kickstarter backers at $30 or more will get a year free. HDHomeRun’s viewing apps already work great, so I have high expectations for its DVR software. The Kickstarter notes suggest that Silicondust already has most of it running but hopes use pledge proceeds to add programmers to add support for protected content. If the project gets enough support, Silicondust may also create an iOS app, filling the most obvious gap in its current ecosystem.

From all I’ve seen and heard, Silicondust is made of good people who make products that work well. All Kickstarter projects involve risk, but I think I’ll make a $30 or $60 bet on the HDHomeRun DVR.

by ·Comments Off on NAB Notes: OTA DVR roundup edition
Luc Tomasino, TabletTV CMO, describes his product at the NAB Show.

Luc Tomasino, TabletTV CMO, describes his product at the NAB Show.

I’ve about recovered from the annual National Association of Broadcasters Show in Las Vegas, held this week. Its organizers announced that over 100,000 people attended this year, a slight increase over last year, but the general mood was just a little quieter.

Before the show opened, Multichannel News hit the stands with a cover story on over-the-air TV: Threat From the Skies. You should read the whole thing, but the main idea was that pay TV should be concerned about OTA, especially OTA DVRs such as TiVo’s Roamio OTA and Channel Master’s DVR+, which is pictured in the article.

Despite this heightened awareness, not much actually happened with those OTA DVRs. The DVR+ displayed some recent integrated online video sources in its program grid, but Channel Master representatives expected to have bigger news in a few weeks. Simple.TV didn’t make a public appearance, although news came during the show that it had raised another $5.1 million. Tablo issued a press release that said it was trying to lure regional broadband operators to add its service. TabletTV hosted a conference session for low-power TV broadcasters to point out that in an OTA program grid, the LPTV listings are just as prominent as the full-power guys’.

There just wasn’t much news from this group in Las Vegas, but I expect to hear a lot more soon.

Other notes:

  • NAB President Gordon Smith’s keynote was genial and relaxed. For example, he said that in contrast to cable TV news, local TV news is important because it’s “where Americans turn when they want just the facts with no yelling, screaming and finger-pointing.” Smith is a sharp guy celebrating five years of satisfying the disparate audiences within the association, but this particular speech sounded a lot like a fireside chat from SCTV’s Mayor Tommy Shanks.
  • Features of the next-generation broadcasting standard, ATSC 3.0, found their way into several exhibitors’ displays, which demonstrated text-based emergency alerts, seamless mobile reception, 4K resolution, and many other wish-list items. What’s still uncertain is exactly which of those features will be included in the finalized version of ATSC 3.0, which will then require a whole new generation of TV sets to view it. Expect at least another decade with the status quo.
  • Camera drones were a big topic of conversion and demonstration. Brian Holl, VP of Strategy and Outreach for the Small UAV Coalition, showed off a small multi-rotor flier and discussed the FAA’s rules against commercial use of such devices. Holl said that his organization is focusing on Congress to change the law to allow responsible piloting of camera drones. While it might not happen soon, Holl believed that it was inevitable; as he put it, “Technology always wins.”

by ·Comments Off on 4SeTV shows off 4-in-1 OTA TV
Founder Hyung Lim with a TV displaying four shows at once

Founder Hyung Lim with a TV displaying four shows at once

I love it when anyone tried to do something new with over-the-air TV signals. I also like hearing about entrepreneurs who took a great idea and did whatever was needed to make it a reality. So I really enjoyed meeting Hyung Lim, founder of 4SeTV, which was exhibiting at the ShowStoppers event just before the 2015 edition of the NAB Show in Las Vegas.

The basic idea is pretty simple – take four OTA tuners, build a four-panel display with four TV signals, then send them over a local network to a smart TV or other internet-enabled viewing device. According to the 4SeTV web site, the idea came to Lim as a great way to watch sports on several channels at once.

I don’t like to be negative, but despite several listings at the 4SeTV booth of some Saturday and Sunday afternoons that happened to include four OTA sporting events, live sports are running away from OTA, not towards it. Fortunately, Lim also sold 4SeTV’s mother company, DMT, on the idea of selling this as a feature to cable companies, possibly reserving one of the screen quarters for advertisements.

Still, it seemed to me that Lim would like to see that little 4SeTV device work in cable-cutter households. It’s on its second Kickstarter, where it’s available for $99 instead of the projected eventual, who’s-gonna-pay-it price of $179. It sure looks like a fun feature, and I salute anyone who cares that much about OTA TV.

by ·Comments Off on Simple.TV may shift more to the cloud

Simple.TV box in front of a cloudIn January, when we last looked in on Simple.TV, it had just suffered a devastating data loss. Because of a server crash and failed backups, Simple.TV users couldn’t access their recordings, even though those users’ local hard drives still contained all of those shows. Without the central server’s cloud-based indexing and metadata, all of those files were unviewable dead weight.

“I got the call at 2 am from our developers in the UK,” recalled Mark Ely, Simple.TV’s CEO. “It was the worst-case scenario you could think of.”

Things got better. In about a week, Simple.TV developed and released a stopgap method for users to recover those files. Its service kept plugging along with no further catastrophes; according to Ely, it now has “tons of redundancy.” In fact, the next generation of Simple.TV devices will use the cloud for file storage as well as metadata.

Coming in the second half of 2016 2015 (sorry, typo) “in time for the holidays,” the new devices from an unannounced partner are expected to include four tuners (see update below), an internet connection, an HDMI output and little else. The unit will feature a new guide and new program discovery tools, possibly including internet-based TV options. Legacy one- and two-tuners may be included in this “whole new front end,” although Ely said Simple.TV developers were still working on how to transition those existing customers to the fully cloud-based system once it’s ready. Update: I noticed that another blog quotes an email from Ely backing away from four tuners on the new devices. That’s what was in my notes from our conversation, but if he doesn’t want to commit to four, I understand.

They’re coming from slightly different directions, but Tablo, DVR+, TiVo’s Roamio OTA, and Simple.TV are all converging on a unified discovery system for over-the-air and internet TV in one box. We’ll see who wins this battle for cord-cutters.

Two more Simple.TV notes:

  • Simple.TV fixed an annoyance that I pointed out last October; now when scanning for channels, there is only one version of the Local Over the Air Broadcast option available rather than several. For me, anyway. Now I don’t have to wonder whether I’ve selected the most recent local channel lineup.
  • A tip from the CEO: If a local channel has the wrong guide listings or none at all, just remap that channel to a close match from a different market. When the Movies! network popped up on one of my local station, I found a Movies! affiliate in a different Zip Code and remapped to that one.