In this golden age of TV, when there's more on offer than you could pack into six lifetimes, it's still way too difficult to find anything to watch. All your favorite shows and movies reside in different apps, on different boxes, plugged into different ports on your TV. And so you end up paralyzed. How many times have you sat in front of your TV, watching a video on your phone? A medium once so blissfully mindless that people called it the Idiot Box has become an unsolvable puzzle.
What you need is a Rosetta stone for TV. Caavo says it has one.
The late entrepreneur Blake Krikorian (you know him from Sling) founded Caavo with people from places like Sling, Xbox, and Dish. They spent several years working on their first product, which is also called Caavo and rhymes with Cabo, your favorite spring break locale. It sports eight HDMI ports, and its software automatically recognizes and configures virtually any device you plug in. Once that's done, you can hide all those gadgets anywhere you like. Caavo provides the universal input for all your home theater needs.
You can use the lovely wooden Caavo controller to control almost anything: the robust universal remote features a touchscreen and multi-functional buttons. Caavo works with Alexa, too, and Google Assistant and Siri are coming. If you really like the remote your gear came with, great. You can use it. Caavo's software sniffs out which device you're trying to use, and automatically switches to it. You can pause your iTunes movie to Chromecast a video, or switch between the football game and your Madden contest just by grabbing your controller.
The Caavo box costs $399, which feels like a lot for a middleman device. At its most basic, that's all Caavo is: it simply puts everything on the same input and switches among them seamlessly. "We have to work with, and embrace, what people already use," says CEO Andrew Einaudi. That's just the first step---next comes making it all work together. "The only way to do that is to unify your living room devices, your remotes, your apps, your services, your watchlists, and your content, all in one place." As he talks, Einaudi stands in front of a TV in a gorgeous apartment high above San Francisco. He casually picks up a remote and presses a button; it jumps to Roku and starts playing Curious George on Hulu. He taps the voice button and says "MSNBC." Caavo jumps to his DirecTV cable box and to the channel. Ta-da!
Bringing all your gear together is a neat parlor trick, but really you'll love how it makes navigation a snap. Its slick universal guide combines programming from all your devices in one interface. "Continue Watching" places your latest binges on Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, and others on a single page. Search for a show or movie and Caavo reveals every place it's available---including live TV and the web. You can maintain a cross-platform, cross-device watchlist of everything you want to watch. Most of these features exist already, but only Caavo brings them together in in device. "Everyone's nibbling at little pieces of the problem," Einaudi says, "but not taking a holistic approach."
In the competitive and territorial world of media streaming, Caavo works because it steadfastly refuses to be anything other than a middleman. The Caavo box runs Android, but it won't run apps. Ever. The company wants to make it easier to access and manage all your devices, not make another one. Aggarwal says that makes his company an enticing partner---not one company has rejected Caavo or refused it access. "A giant company could go try and do this," he says, "but they could never actually do this. Because they have competitors."
Caavo has no interest in making apps or creating content, but it does think a lot about what to do with all that data. If Caavo the product takes off, Caavo the company will have a wider, deeper view of what, when, and how people watch than anyone. Lots of people would want a look at that. Aggarwal mentions an example: Netflix would definitely like to know where you go when you stop watching a show. What do you watch next? What device or app do you use? That could change how Netflix offers recommendations, even the types of content it buys and creates. It also raises yet more creepy feelings about how much you’re being watched while you watch TV. Caavo will grapple with that soon, and ought to learn from the Vizios of the world.
For now, though, Caavo simply wants a spot next to your TV. The first thing you see after switching on your set is prized territory, and Caavo could own it. "We can control all these devices, we can deep-link to apps, we can deep-link to devices, and we can do it all by being the central platform for all this content," Einaudi says. When I tell him it sounds way too good to be true, that even after trying it myself I still suspect he faked the demo, he laughs. "That's what everyone says." He figures that's a good sign.
