In what one customer suggests “feels like a bait & switch,” AirTV has shipped without its primary selling point enabled. Instead of directly integrating over-the-air television content into the Sling TV guide, there is merely a button to launch the separate, Google-produced Live Channels OTA app. Further, the promised Netflix integration may also be incomplete leading another owner to describe the suspiciously backordered Android-powered box as “basically equivalent to a Nexus Player.”
Sling TV CEO Roger Lynch indicates beta software was pitched at CES and that they intend to deploy OTA integration “soon” whereas another source indicates “early 2017” — whether or not they’ll deliver within the 30 day return window is anyone’s guess, but it’s certainly an inauspicious beginning to this initiative. Consumer trust is difficult to recapture, once lost…
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I guess it's a good thing I didn't order. I'd be absolutely livid. I dunno, maybe put a note on the webpage or remove the "one guide, one interface" bit o' marketing?
I don't know what he means by it's equivalent to a Nexus Player? Does he mean power-wise? It's an AndroidTV box. What does he expect?
Integration would be nice, but that's more a software issue than anything else. These boxes will never be more than AndroidTV boxes. I wonder how it stands up to the new AndroidTV MiBox (hardware-wise)?
I assume he expects it to do what their marketing page advertises and what they demo-ed at CES, without any caveats that these core features would come at a later date. Hard to know who will throw more resources at these devices (DISH, Xioami) over time. Given Google's history in the TV space, other than Chromecast, both may have limited shelf lives. The MiBox looks better, visually, and costs less... On the high-end, the Nvidia Shield v2 seems quite nice but maybe hard to justify the cost given everything else out there.
Does anyone know if the remote is infrared or that the device has an infrared sensor? If it does, I'd be hoping that it shows up in Harmony's database so that I could try it on my Mi Box. It would be awesome if I could assign buttons on my Harmony remote to Sling TV or Live Channels. Since I had been told that AirTV had launched first overseas, I wonder if someone out there might have the apk for the customised Sling TV app that we could possibly sideload to our Android TV boxes....