The battle for your cord-cutting dollars continues to heat up. Hardware for streaming, time-shifting (recording to DVR), or place-shifting (watching your TV content on mobile devices) continues to flood the market, promising to take up all your precious HDMI ports. Simple.TV does all those things and leaves your ports for more important things, like game consoles.
On Monday, the Simple.TV DVR streamer began shipping. The device differs from other DVRs on the market because it doesn't actually connect to a TV. Instead, it connects to over-the-air HDTV signals or cable TV and streams the content to iOS devices, HTML-enabled browsers and Roku boxes. With a $50-a-year subscription, users can send streams over the internet to up to five devices at once. How might this come in handy? Say the latest episode of The Walking Dead is about to come on, and you're at the airport and days away from being able to watch it on your DVR. With this service, you can open up your iPad and watch whenever and wherever you want.
The Simple.TV connects to a home network via Ethernet and to a digital TV antenna or cable TV via a coaxial port. It then streams Live TV or stored media to supported devices. Without a yearly subscription, those streams are confined to a local network. Part TiVo and part SlingBox, the Simple.TV is intriguing, but it does have limitations.
The DVR lacks internal storage and requires an external USB drive to use the DVR capabilities. The single coaxial input limits the recording feature to one show at a time. And without a subscription, cool features like scheduling an entire series won't work. Finally, the device doesn't work with encrypted channels, leaving premium networks like HBO and Showtime out of the streaming fun.
Still, if you like the idea of an all-in-one DVR/streamer, the Simple.TV is one more option for your cord-cutting arsenal.
