OTA recordings show an antenna symbol, while Sling’s show a cloud

Finally finding a use for the second USB port in back, and answering my occasional complaint here, Sling announced yesterday that it has added a DVR for over-the-air TV to its AirTV Player. It’s just a beta for now, but it’s open to all AirTV Player users, at least the ones who hear about it. I first noticed it in a story by Jeff Baumgartner at Multichannel News, although I later found the press release at PR Newswire (registration required). But I never saw an email from Sling or AirTV about it.

As its information page explains, there are still plenty of caveats to this early OTA beta. The USB hard drive has to be fast enough to handle HD recording, which means that most portable hard drives are good but many thumb drives are too slow. Viewers can’t watch a recording until it’s finished. Rescanning for local channels removes any pending recording requests. Buffered viewing, with pausing and rewinding, still isn’t available for live OTA TV. And the the AirTV uses a single OTA tuner, so viewers can’t watch one OTA show while recording another.

Speaking of that tuner, I was amused by AirTV’s illustration (shown right) of where to plug in the USB hard drive. Looking at the unit from behind, they suggest the leftmost USB port, although mine is working fine in the right port. What’s missing from that picture is AirTV’s OTA tuner, which is a Hauppauge dongle that plugs into the other USB port. If you don’t have them both attached, you don’t have an OTA DVR.

In about 12 hours of testing, I couldn’t find any big problems yet. OTA recordings line up with cloud DVR recordings of Sling programming. They also populate the Continue Watching ribbon as appropriate. The guide appears to be Rovi-based, and shows everything scheduled for about six days forward. I couldn’t find anything through Search, but I can scroll over to any show I already know about, and the AirTV Player will allow series recording like a TiVo Season Pass.

This Local Channels DVR Service is free during the beta period, matching Channel Master’s DVR+ (which still supports Sling at the moment) and Stream+ (which “will be shipping here any day”). Despite the limitations of a single tuner, it’s a big step up for the AirTV Player. We’ll see whether the finished product will be enough to make it the cord-cutters’ favorite.

What a day! I’ve got very serious storm drain work going on outside my normally peaceful office, and from the beeping it sounds like an excavator is running slow, backward circles around the project. With my kid off at high school, I keep remembering the photo of that poor Florida dad wearing a Trump 2020 shirt while asking in vain about his daughter. I can’t find anything exciting or positive enough to overcome all that, so you’re getting a second helping of notes this week.

John Eggerton, the hardest working man in Washington, noted that the National Association of Broadcasters would like the FCC to tweak the retransmission consent / must-carry rule, by which unpopular channels can force themselves onto the cable dial while popular ones can hold their signal for ransom. Currently, the default is must-carry; a station that would prefer to negotiate for some cash has to formally notify cable systems and the like. The NAB would prefer to switch that default to retrans, in case one of its member stations fumbles the paperwork (it happens) and could lose out on that sweet, sweet retrans money. Never mind that the unpopular stations are the least likely to have the kind of staff to handle proactive paperwork to request must-carry status.

As mentioned by Jeff Baumgartner, sports-first OTT streamer fuboTV has added a Family Share option. For $6/month, instead of two simultaneous streams, a subscriber can add a third stream to share “with additional family members.” At some level, aren’t we all family? This was just a few days after fuboTV hooked up with a unit of Sears Holdings to offer cash back or rewards or something like that. Because nothing says forward-thinking like a close relationship with Sears.

And the diginet Bounce announced today that it had swung a deal with The Wendy Williams Show to broadcast episodes in prime time the same day that they ran in syndication during the day on local stations. The press release said, “The deal represents the first-ever repurposed programming arrangement done by a new-generation broadcast network, also known as a multicast network.” I see this as another sign that a lot of people don’t have over-the-air TV DVRs, because if they did, why wouldn’t they just record the afternoon show?

Next week, more rest, fewer distractions, less snark. I hope.

Michael Malone at Broadcasting & Cable wrote this afternoon that the CW will expand its programming to six nights a week including Sunday evenings. At 12 hours a week, it’s still not a full-fledged network, but at least we’ll get a couple more hours of fresh programming broadcast over the air.

YouTube TV looks a lot more attractive to me now that it has added the Turner networks, as reported by FierceCable’s Ben Munson. Beginning March 13, the price will rise from $35/month to $40, but before then subscribers can lock in that $35 rate. There are also reports that MLB Network will become available. Now if it can add Comedy Central, then I might think about switching.

Finally, Alan Wolk at Decider wrote yesterday that over-the-top services such as Sling and YouTube TV, though not exactly “cord-cutting” according to his strict definition, are “poised to take over the world.” Jeff Baumgartner of Multichannel News had estimates of all the OTT providers, with Sling leading at 2.3 million subscribers and DirecTV Now second at 1.2 million. However, Netflix has about 55 million subscribers in the US alone, so we might need to wait a while before OTT completes that world takeover.