The Sling-powered Arris MS4000 media streamer has found its first home(s). Regional cable providers Comporium and Service Electric are now offering up these transcoding boxes to their customers for both in-home and mobile streaming. Ideally, this sort of service is resident within one’s DVR, à la TiVo Roamio or DISH Hopper, but this accessory provides an efficient way to retrofit existing Moxi Whole Home DVR hardware. And, unlike an agnostic retail Slingbox, given tighter MS4000 integration with the source tuners, up to 4 concurrent streams can be broadcast.
I’d assumed all operators would go with a monthly rental, as RCN does with the TiVo Stream, yet Service Electric has decided to provide streaming services via a single flat fee:
SE Next Everywhere … $159.95
- With ”SE Next Everywhere” you have the ability to watch everything on TV -LIVE!- on any mobile device (tablet, phone, PC and Mac) from everywhere… home, around town or across the world.
- PLUS control and view programs on your DVR from anywhere.
- Requirements and Special Notes:
- SE Next Everywhere is a one-time only fee of $159.95 and can be purchased by calling Cable Products Direct at 954-427-2192
- Requires a Whole Home DVR Base System.
- Requires the SE Next App
I can’t get anyone on the phone at Comporium that has any idea what I am talking about, this is still great news! Will this work with all the current slingplayers?
That’s a good question. On Comporium, they’re calling this “Moxi Sling” and it requires the Moxi Whole Home DVR. For both Comporium and Service Electric, at launch they’re going with their own branded iOS apps with an Android app to follow and no mention of desktop access. Unlike Sling’s mobile apps, these will be free – at least SE’s is. But I wonder if you’ll be able to use Sling’s desktop, Roku, etc apps anyway.
Should be interesting to see how these operate out-of-home. If it will be like Hopper or like Stream with copy protected content like HBO.
I’ll add an update to how it works with Comporium once I can purchase one. I have had a 350 hooked to its own Moxie whole home dvr for a while now with good results. We have 5mbps upload speed (the highest you can get without fiber) so I doubt streaming to multiple clients will work well, perhaps it will help a little with a single HD stream though?
Jonathan, it’s not entirely clear but it sorta sounds like you can have up to 4 internal simultaneous streams, but only 1 external. Something else to check out. Of course, each operator will probably do their own thing on pricing and functionality, depending on their licensing, comfort level, etc. Regardless, this is a nice solution for smaller cablecos to fend off other providers without the difficulty and expense of building their own TV Everywhere thing from scratch.
This is encouraging news for people who get their cable TV service from the smaller providers. I’m glad to see they’ve found a way to compete in this feature segment.
Yeah, presumably wi-fi would be used while at home, so the upload speed would only be a be a limiting factor when using cellular data or someone else’s wi-fi.
How many concurrent streams can the M1 handle anyway?
Slingbox has never allowed multiple, simultaneous connections in an effort to stay out of trouble. Meaning, the one stream out of the home is probably just as much political as it is technical. Also, given the Arris boxes talking directly to each other in a way Slingbox can’t, each of the four streams can co-opt its own tuner – so family member X can watch Channel 1 on an iPad upstairs, while family member Y is watching Channel 2 from the Starbucks. It’s more like the TiVo Stream than a Slingbox in practice. Except Sling is far more experienced and capable in this realm.
I have secv (www.secv.com), a sister division of Service Electric (The founder of Cable TV John Walson left a system to each of his kids when he passed. I’m in his daughter Rosalie’s system).
They have the Arris Media Gateway 5 series as of the beginning of July. They also have these media player 2040’s I think is the model. It’s the newest one with the white LCD and capacitive touch buttons on the front panel. Anyway they are not mentioning any offering of this device. Though I did check John Walson Jr’s system (SE) and I see its pretty much the same exact offering but along with this option. Seems like there is only IOS support at this time, so your out of luck if you have an android. Nice to see these little cable companies on the move, but I would of rather seen them go with Tivo than Arris. Supposedly the TIvo solution (they did test it internally) was too “complicated” for them. I had to laugh at that one. Tivo is known for its intuitive nature and it was too complicated.
Oh well I guess I’ll just stick with my 25/2 mbps 300GB/month internet and phone service and keep DirecTV for now. The Moxi really is not any different from the retail one from 2008. I bet its going to go 10 years looking exactly the same. Arris bought them for what reason now? Just to get into smaller operators clutches? Sure doesn’t seem like they are doing any software maintenance or updates with it. I’d rather see Comcast licence X1 to smaller operators, or see more MSO’s choose Tivo.