by ·Comments Off on Will Simple.TV recover after Tuesday's crash?
Man with gun pointed at his foot

© Depositphotos.com / hyrons

Sorry, but I’ve got two reasons to add another interruption to my rundown of great over-the-air TV solutions that I saw at the International CES. First, despite getting the flu shot in October, I came down with the flu Friday. The worst is over, though I’m miffed that I won’t get a refund on the flu shot. I’ve been using my downtime to enjoy the hours of OTA shows and movies that I had recorded on my Simple.TV receiver. Monday, that was great. Tuesday, Simple.TV caught its own version of the flu. That’s my second reason.

Based on posts at Simple.TV’s community forum, on Monday the company sent out an email to some subscribers (not me) noting that it would perform “essential maintenance to Simple.TV’s online systems” in the wee hours Tuesday morning from 4-8 am Eastern. “During this period your Simple.TV will not be available.” Not so bad. Then came another email early Tuesday morning that said in part: “While carrying out a scheduled upgrade of our online systems we have encountered an issue and the Simple.TV service will be offline while we fix the fault.” I first noticed this later in the morning after Simple.TV had updated its home page to say that the service was temporarily down.

That outage lasted all day and into the early evening, but when service was restored, we users learned that wasn’t the worst of it. Apparently, Simple.TV has resorted to a backup that was about a half-year old, so everything that had been recorded since then remained unavailable for viewing even though the recordings remained on each user’s local hard drive. There were lots of other fun changes with reactivating receivers (carefully, so as not to wipe the hard drive), rescanning some channel lists, making fresh account passwords, and about anything else caused by having the Simple.TV cloud six months out of sync with its receivers.

When I wrote my comparative review between Tablo and Simple.TV, I failed to highlight one difference between the two because it didn’t seem very important at the time. Tablo keeps a lot (all?) of its data on the local receiver while Simple.TV is cloud-based. That’s not an issue unless, somehow, the cloud comes crashing down.

This afternoon, Simple.TV sent out another email, again not to me, noting that all those unviewable recordings “still physically exist on your connected hard drive (make sure not to format it) and we are actively doing our best to restore as many of them as we can, as quickly as possible.” I’ve verified that post-crash shows are easy to record and play back. If Simple.TV can restore everyone’s access to their recordings in a couple of days, maybe they can find a way to bounce back. But if they’re getting out of the hardware business and users can’t trust their cloud, what does Simple.TV have left?

Update: After a week, Simple.TV updated its cloud to show that there were “recovered recordings” on those local hard drives. The only information available was the time and date for each recording (making them a lot like the recordings on a HomeWorX DVR), but at least they were viewable again. Thanks to an Android program that can download those recordings, I pulled my 100+ shows to my PC, where I could identify and label them. Thanks to Simple.TV for doing what it could to set things right.

by ·Comments Off on Sling complement candidate #3: Roamio OTA

Screen shot from TiVo Roamio OTABack now to my reports from the International CES about over-the-air TV receivers that might be worthy complements to Dish’s announced Sling TV service. The next box to consider is TiVo’s Roamio OTA, which might be better than its competitors in every way but one.

TiVo pioneered the DVR and has the patents to prove it. Its iconic “peanut” remote control remains the gold standard for ease of use despite being stuffed with so very many little buttons. TiVo’s idea of “suggestions” – filling the DVR hard drive by recording shows you didn’t ask for but might like – remains unique among DVRs, suggesting to me that it’s one of TiVo’s patents.

Now TiVo has improved that wonderful, friendly user interface with the integration of streaming services. As you can see in the accompanying photo, if you’re not getting enough Two and a Half Men episodes from your local CW affiliate, the Roamio OTA indicates that more episodes are available from Amazon Instant Video and Vudu. It’s the perfect way to fill in episode gaps for binge watching.

The Roamio OTA can even stream like a Simple.TV or Tablo with the addition of the little TiVo Stream device. The list price for the Roamio OTA is a ridiculously low $49.99. There’s just one drawback, its fatal flaw: the excessive service fees required to operate it.

Let’s compare service fees per month, and over a three-year period.

  • DVR+: $0/month, $0/3 years
  • Simple.TV: $50/year, $150/3 years (lifetime)
  • Tablo: $5/month, $150/3 years (lifetime)
  • Roamio OTA: $14.99/month, $539.65/3 years

The Roamio OTA is ineligible for any TiVo lifetime subscription, so it gets expensive very quickly. Yes, the service is top-of-the-line, but does TiVo really need to charge that much for maybe 50 channels of guide data? Its competitors suggest that it does not. If you’re a cord-cutter with money to burn (if such a person exists), then the Roamio OTA should make you very happy. If you’re cutting back to save money, the Roamio OTA isn’t your best choice.

by ·Comments Off on Rest in peace NimbleTV
Tombstone for NimbleTV

© Depositphotos.com / HitTune

I must pause from my International CES reporting to report the demise of a unique TV streaming service. NimbleTV, which had continued to collect emails for a 2015 relaunch after it “paused” on Monday, was acquired yesterday by another company. Synacor, which helps its clients deliver branded, personalized media, picked up NimbleTV’s patents and personnel, then told re/code’s Peter Kafka that NimbleTV had been “discontinued” and would not return.

On its web site, NimbleTV’s signup links now forward to a thank-you page (still named “signup.php”) which verifies that “we have decided to end our direct-to-consumer service.” That page claims NimbleTV had planned all along to be “a technology enabler for companies interested in boosting their streaming and TV viewing capabilities” as well as a streaming service.

I don’t believe it. Go watch NimbleTV founder/CEO Anand Subramanian’s June 2012 speech where he outlines his plans. What I saw in that video was a guy from India with a great idea to enable internet-based cable TV subscriptions, eventually including subscriptions from India. Subramanian made sure that every cable or (as it turned out) Dish TV subscriber paid full price to that company, plus a little extra for NimbleTV’s video concierge service. That sounded fair to me, but apparently the cable and satellite companies (under pressure from their content providers?) didn’t like it that they weren’t consulted.

I must reiterate here that my only knowledge of the innards of NimbleTV were the glimpses I saw as a paying customer. I know that NimbleTV signed me up to a Dish Network subscription for which I received exactly one paper bill before it presumably switched to some sort of NimbleTV autopay. I know that the pay-TV channels carried Dish ads, and that bad thunderstorms around New York could disrupt my service. The rest is speculation only.

My guess is that the fate of NimbleTV was determined by its Indian service and whatever happened to it. For a while, it offered several channel packages from a few different India-based cable companies, then that vanished without explanation. (Scroll down here to see a screen grab.) Was it pressure from Dish, whose DishWorld subsidiary also sells channel packages from India? Whatever torpedoed the Indian connection must have been devastating to NimbleTV’s founders. Also around that time, NimbleTV apparently started pulling in over-the-air channels (not offered on Dish) to package for verified local cable subscribers, who would have therefore paid any retransmission fees. Perhaps that was the point when NimbleTV began positioning itself more as a potential partner or acquisition candidate?

In my head, it all worked out this way: Back in July 2013, Dish had shut off service to NimbleTV for a few weeks but restored it after NimbleTV made some changes including never again mentioning the word “Dish.” After that, Dish was willing to take NimbleTV’s subscribers’ money rather than cause a public stink about it. Around December 2014, Dish told NimbleTV that it was going to launch Sling TV at CES, and that it was time for NimbleTV to gracefully cease reselling Dish programming. NimbleTV cut off new signups in late December and announced its “pause” during CES. With no income sources, it was time to cash out, so Synacor picked up a well-tested technology and the people who created it. That is the theory that I have, and which is mine.

I’m disappointed to have to add NimbleTV to the internet TV graveyard with ivi, Aereo (I remember when it was Bamboom), FilmOn (oh wait, FilmOn’s not dead), and Flo TV. There will always be demand for TV when and where we want to see it, through the internet. I look forward to the day when someone is allowed to sell us viewers what we want.

by ·Comments Off on Sling complement candidate #2: DVR+

DVRPlusContinuing my survey of contenders to provide an over-the-air complement to Sling TV’s streaming pay-TV channels, next up is Channel Master’s DVR+. Unlike Simple.TV and Tablo, DVR+ won’t stream TV to your tablet or office, but it provides an easy way to watch and record OTA shows. And one of its best features is what isn’t there; despite robust, up-to-date guide data, there are no monthly fees with the DVR+.

(Apparently that lack of outbound streaming can be fixed with a Slingbox 500, recommended by Channel Master as a complement to the DVR+. That Slingbox 500 receiver had recently been renamed to Sling TV, but it’s unrelated to the Sling TV service that Dish announced last week at the International CES. I’ve read that the 500 will soon revert to its original name. How’s that for confusing?)

The most interesting changes in the DVR+ will be a huge expansion in the number of internet channels it will display in addition to OTA TV. You can catch a glimpse of what that might look like in my photo above, and you can find a more thorough rundown of the possible extra channels at Zatz Not Funny. That guide expansion is due to roll out in early 2015 as a software update for all existing DVR+ receivers.

When I reviewed the DVR+ last year, I focused on its even standing vs. a Windows Media Center PC. Since then, the DVR+ keeps improving while Windows Media Center, which was never as simple to use, stands still. If you’re a cord-cutter looking for an easy solution with no monthly fees, the DVR+ might be your best choice.

by ·Comments Off on Sling complement candidate #1: Tablo
Tablo's projected Roku app interface

Tablo’s projected Roku app interface

As I wrote last time, Sling TV looks like it could be the low-cost streaming solution for some viewers, particularly with the (temporary?) demise of NimbleTV. But Sling only works if the viewer also has a set of local over-the-air broadcast channels to complement it. I saw several candidates for that job at the International CES, and the first was Tablo, an OTA tuner, DVR, and streamer.

Before I start, I should mention Tablo’s main competitor, Simple.TV. It was just last year that Simple.TV used CES to announce the launch of its first two-tuner receiver. This year, Simple.TV had no official presence at CES. When I asked before the show, a rep told me that some Simple.TV folks would attend, but that there wouldn’t be any opportunity for meetings. While I was at the show, I heard rumors from two other companies that Simple.TV is exiting the hardware business to focus on its software. My single-tuner Simple.TV still works solidly, albeit slowly, and the company continues to release maintenance updates. Simple.TV is still around, but it’s not giving me a lot of reasons to recommend it.

At CES, I met with Tablo CEO Grant Hall, and he was excited about the improvements that are in the Tablo pipeline. Hall was showing off the innards of his next receiver version – the Tablo METRO, which includes a couple of OTA antennas built into the box. (You can see a photo at the Tablo blog.) I can’t imagine folks who don’t want a rooftop antenna, just like I can’t imagine folks who don’t think the Three Stooges were funny, but I guess they’re out there, and this receiver could give them everything they need without an external antenna. That’s if it works as advertised; we’ll see when the METRO comes out in a month or two.

The other update on the horizon is to Tablo’s Roku channel. The current version looks like a lot of other Roku channels – manageable but nothing like a modern program listing grid. As you can see in my photo above, the new Roku channel will look exactly like a modern program listing grid. Shoehorning this kind of functionality onto the Roku platform will be quite an achievement if it works. Hall was basically showing a mock up, but he wouldn’t do that if he didn’t think his team could pull it off.

When I reviewed the Tablo, I thought it was already a little better than Simple.TV. If these improvements pan out, I might have to consider buying a Tablo receiver and shelving my Simple.TV. Then again, maybe one of the other two major Sling complement candidates will work better. More about them next time.