I finally took possession of an Amazon Fire TV Recast DVR... and, boy, is it is massive.
I assume Amazon went with off-the-shelf components to get to market quickly and, should they find success in this space, invest more resources in a smarter, custom design for v2… much as they did in utilizing the Blackberry Playbook reference design for their first Fire tablet.
Both AFTVNews and competitor Silicon Dust have cracked open the Recast DVR and confirmed a humongo reference board and tons of empty space … to presumably help dissipate heat. For comparison, here’s the Recast DVR next to the incoming 2-tuner, 1TB HDHomeRun Scribe OTA DVR. Ouch?
Sadly, the Recast’s physical size is not all all indicative of supersize capabilities. It’s a seriously incomplete product. Probably fine for live antenna television streamed to Fire TV hardware and smartphones, but anyone coming from any other DVR solution will be sorely disappointed with its inferior feature set. Tablo, Channels, TiVo are well-rounded, mature solutions — each of them is superior to Recast at the moment, assuming you can stomach the service fees.