As Rovi indicates TiVo could move away from retail hardware, it appears Amazon is preparing to offer over-the-air capabilities on Fire TV … which dovetails nicely with uncovered support to display live channels within the AFTV interface. The Fire TV would obviously need some sort of network tuner, a la HDHomeRun, or a USB accessory, like the Xbox One, to pull in the signal via antenna. Of course, most televisions offer similar tuning capabilities. But accessing all our video content from a single interface offers some benefit… especially given Amazon’s search and voice capabilities. Having said that, for many, OTA content without DVR recording capabilities is a non-starter. Could that, too, be on the docket via USB storage or a subscription cloud service? In any event, piping in antenna television locally, as Sling intends to do with AirTV, is an excellent way to round out the video experience without worrying about retransmission licensing challenges that plague Sony’s PS Vue and the MIA Apple TV streaming service.
3 thoughts on “Amazon Fire TV Going OTA?”
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Well. This is interesting and something I suggested to Amazon a couple of months back.
Looks like the race is on between Amazon Fire TV and Android TV to incorporate OTA guide and DVR functionality into their streaming boxes this year. Wonder if we’ll also see such from the rumored Microsoft X-box-based streamer to supposedly be unveiled at E3 this month?
Microsoft has indicated DVR is coming to Xbox One. We’ll see if the rumored new “lite” boxes will incorporate similar.
If this comes to pass using an HDHR Prime, then my TiVo days are over, unless they do something very groundbreaking or similar to this. I will use my FireTV with the HDHR for local channels and my Vue subscription on it for my sports from Philly over VPN. I was thinking of using a Tablo to do this, but I don’t have one yet and they’re expensive and require a subscription, but I do have an HDHR Prime ready and waiting.