Several years after the questionable SCOTUS smackdown of Aereo, upstart Locast is similarly attempting to stream antenna television… to those who may not have reception or prefer to watch on something other than a television. Unlike the for-profit model of Aereo, which provided live television with DVR capabilities to customers via rented regional micro-antennas, Locast is … Read more
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 … Read more
Silicon Dust’s groundbreaking cord cutter service that co-mingles pay television with over-the-air broadcasts, via HDHomeRun hardware, appears to be on the ropes given a lawsuit filed against Omnivese, their upstream content provider: “Plaintiffs (Disney, Sony, Fox, etc) have not granted licenses that permit Defendant DeMeo or Omniverse to stream the Copyrighted Works or sublicense streams … Read more
Aereo may be long gone, but the dream of streaming affordable local television (without an antenna) lives on. And a Stanford University research project has answered the call with Puffer. We enjoy some television on-the-house and they use machine learning to improve video streaming algorithms: We are trying to figure out how to teach a … Read more
TechHive held quite the conversation with TiVo at CES. And one of the most promising revelations was TiVo contemplating a service similar to HDHomeRun Premium, to commingle streaming “cable” channels alongside OTA antenna television. Essentially, cable content without the cable company. But unlike, say, a walled garden Sling TV app, TiVo would would merge these … Read more
TiVo’s 2018 “Game Skip” experiment appears to have been so successful that the DVR pioneer will once again invert their commercial skip functionality to spotlight Super Bowl ads. As described last year: Everyone knows that [the Super Bowl] commercials are some of the best, highest quality commercials of the year. So, we’re going to tag the … Read more
At long last, TiVo is publicly committing to a soft client streamer apps for retail DVRs, such as the newly released Bolt OTA. So instead of investing in a TiVo Mini at each television, we can leverage our existing Apple TV, Fire TV, and Roku boxes to receive both live television and DVR-ed content. Unlike … Read more
Nice! Come March, Tablo DVR owners will be able to automatically skip commercials while playing back television recordings. Unlike TiVo’s somewhat kneecapped SkipMode that only indexes popular, primetime programming and requires manual intervention at each break, Tablo’s solution should index just about everything* and will be automated: Tablo’s commercial-skipping magic is a cloud-based hybrid of digital signal … Read more