Today’s question comes our way from Stephen M:
Has anyone been successful at getting SlingPlayer or SlingPlayerWeb to control a Tivo Premiere? In the player setup, there are no choices for Tivo Premiere or Tivo Series 4.
This should have been a trivial question to answer, even though Sling hasn’t yet published an official virtual remote for the Premiere. Because TiVo’s IR codes and general remote layout are pretty consistent amongst their hardware lineup, classifying the Premiere as a TiVo Series3 or HD for the Slingbox should have handled just about everything other than the four OCAP shortcut buttons. However, after perusing Stephen’s lengthy transcript with Sling Media’s tech support, I realized something was amiss. And, unfortunately, Christina wasn’t able to deviate much from her script to identify that Sling has a problem on their end.
As it turns out, Sling’s online database of IR codes and remote skins has been corrupted or rolled back in some way. Perhaps related to their horribly botched data center migration that resulted in a week or so of downtime for many. Basically, in attempts to set up the AV source via Sling.com as two different TiVo models the remote skins were blanked out and non-functional in several ways/places.
What I did to resolve this problem was to set up the DVR (as a Series 3) in Sling’s stand-alone OS X software client. Once done, I headed back to Sling.com where the remote renders and works properly as seen below.
In chatting with Sling’s support rep, Stephen was somewhat surprised that a device that’s been out 6 months doesn’t have a custom skin at this point. As a former Sling Media employee, I can tell you that keeping current is mostly an unsustainable proposition… Unless one is truly committed and willing to drop the big bucks required to stay current worldwide. Having said that, Sling now offers remote learning capabilities to somewhat empower users.
Lastly, Stephen had a great idea for Sling – something Megazone and I both have previously suggested. Why not entirely drop TiVo IR control in favor of network remote control? Unfortunately, I imagine EchoStar/Sling has other engineering priorities and would rather endorse their DISH 922s DVR+Slingbox combo device.