The app will cost the same as other Sling mobile apps at $29.99.
The Fire app has all the features of other Android version but the remote control buttons appear quite a bit different. It may take a little time getting used to operating everything but all your remote functions are available.
The SlingPlayer for Kindle Fire only has a max resolution of 640×480 so it can’t take advantage of the Fire’s 1024 x 600 display.
If you already own a Slingbox and a Kindle Fire we see no reason not to jump on this app. If you don’t you may want to look at some of the other mobile apps Sling Media offers.
One of the recent bits of news out of CES was DISH Networks introduction of their whole-home DVR. Rather than model number like DirecTV’s oh-so-catchy HR34, they’ve reached down under to give their units cute names. The main DVR is the Hopper and the client units for other rooms are Joeys, and the logo/mascot is a kangaroo, of course. I have to admit, it has a lot more consumer appeal than a cold model number.
The Hopper is only a three tuner DVR, which seems kind of meager given AT&T U-Verse, Verizon FiOS, and TiVo all have four tuner units, the DirecTV HR34 has five tuners, and Arris has a six tuner Moxi DVR available for cable MSOs. Especially as the Joey boxes rely on the tuners in the Hopper for live TV. However, the Hopper does have one unique trick up its sleeve – PrimeTime Anytime:
The Hopper’s exclusive feature, PrimeTime Anytime, gives you instant On Demand access to your favorite shows on ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC in HD. Over three hours per night of HD primetime programming are available to you On Demand anytime for up to eight days from the initial air date.
How does it manage this trick? Well, you may notice the product page states:
The Hopper is a three–tuner Whole–Home HD DVR that lets you record up to six HD channels at once* and play them back from any room in your home.
Three tuners, but it can record up to six HD channels at once? What kind of dark voodoo is this? Well, note the asterisk:“*DURING PRIMETIME HOURS”. And now note this from the quote above“ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC”. How it manages this trick is actually pretty simple, but requires a little explanation.
I’ll oversimplify a bit, but for analog broadcast TV you have one channel per frequency. A tuner did just that – it tuned a given frequency and therefore a program. But with digital content frequencies and channels have a more nebulous relationship. A single frequency block may contain several digital channels all multiplexed, or MUXed, together. And this is precisely how satellite works. They can’t use a dedicated transponder and frequency for each channel, rather channels are MUXed together. So ‘tuning’ a single channel is actually a multi-step process.
First the tuner tunes the desired frequency and this allows the unit to receive the data stream that is the MUX. Normally the next step is that the signal is de-MUXed and the desired channel is extracted, with the other data being discarded. This one channel is then saved to the drive as a recording. Can you see where I’m going?
Since DISH controls everything end to end, what they’ve done is place ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC in one MUX. And instead of de-MUXing the data as it is received they’re saving the entire MUX to the drive, all four channels. Then it is de-MUXed at playback time, not record time. That’s how it can record up to six channels with three tuners. You have one tuner recording the MUX, for four channels, and two tuners each recording a single channel.
But this is limited. As the page states, they do this during prime time hours only. And recording four channels takes up four times the space, even if you’re never going to watch all four channels. The Hopper has a 2TB drive, but only half is available for user recordings – up to 250 hours. The other half is used to store these PrimeTime Anytime MUX recordings, as well as pre-cached OnDemand content pushed the the box. And you can’t record up to six programs you select, you can only record up to three individual programs. Or two programs while the third tuner is occupied recording this MUX. It isn’t clear what happens if you want to record three programs not on these four networks during prime time. Does it only allow you to schedule two recordings? Or does it not record the mux and thus not offer the PrimeTime Anytime content for that night? I suspect the former.
It is a clever trick, but it clearly has some limitations. I’d rather have more tuners at my disposal.
The Hopper does offer Blockbuster OnDemand via broadband, not surprising since DISH purchased Blockbuster. It also has SiriusXM Radio, which is a nice feature for those who subscribe. And while the Hopper is not SlingLoaded, like the ViP922, it is compatible with the USB Sling Adapter, like the ViP722. So you can add the Sling Adapter to enable place shifting. That is a nice feature.
What about MoCA? Well, that’s how the Hopper and Joey units work together to provide the whole-home DVR. MoCA is the new industry standard for whole-home DVRs. It is being widely adopted by cable MSOs, CE vendors such as TiVo, and satellite. DirecTV is also using MoCA for their whole-home streaming. (And before you leave a comment and ‘correct’ me by saying they use DECA, read this post.) I suspect DISH is using Mid-RF MoCA, just like DirecTV.
Overall the Hopper & Joey look like the best DISH Network has to offer, and worthy of being flagship products. However, I think they would’ve been better off bringing a DVR with more tuners to market rather than playing games with the MUX recording for prime time content. There’s no reason they couldn’t do both.
Last September at the IBC show in Amsterdam, Netherlands TiVo’s Director of Product Marketing, Jason Wong, sat down for an interview, the video of which has just been posted. He had a few interesting things to say which hint at possible future directions for TiVo. At the 1m50s mark he mentions TiVo building a portfolio of products. He repeatedly mentions a ‘zapper box’, which from context is the non-DVR TiVo Preview or a similar product. At the 3m15s mark he talks about the whole-home DVR and second screen.
He mentions“a couple of thin-client zapper boxes, with or without a tuner”, which is interesting, since the existing TiVo Preview does have a tuner and CableCARD slot. Perhaps TiVo is working on a more Roku-like streaming-only device? He does mention it again later, referring to it as a ‘thin-client’. I’d like to see that, since I really don’t use Live TV at all and removing the tuner would reduce the cost and complexity of the box, and allow it to be smaller.
Even more interesting, immediately following this he says“that same DVR, with some transcoding capability, can power an iPad or a smartphone within the home”. That’s the second screen, and this is especially interesting considering he said this in September and last week TiVo was showing off a technology demo of a transcoding box at CES. More interesting, he effectively goes on to explain why TiVo is looking at a standalone transcoding box today, and is not yet bundling this into the DVR. It comes down to cost – bundling transcoding into every DVR is too costly today, but he implies that as costs come down it will migrate into the DVR.
But what was music to my ears was his statement at the 5m25s mark, when referring to the types of technology they’ll be using for streaming.“Yes, using DLNA and DLNA approved DRM like DTCP, but yes.” I’ve been saying for years that TiVo should stop using proprietary systems and embrace the growing number of standards, and specifically DLNA and DTCP-IP, to interoperate with other systems.
He then goes on to talk about TiVo’s emerging app strategy, using the SDK which was recently teased. It sounds like they will be opening development up to third parties much more broadly than they have in the past with the likes of HME.
And, finally, he explains TiVo’s software development strategy. As I suspected, and I’ve posted before, they’ve pulled everything into one common ‘trunk’ which they then branch as needed for each partner. If they create something unique for one partner in a branch, they’ll then merge that back into the common trunk so that development for one partner strengthens the trunk and benefits all in future releases. That’s not surprising, it is a standard software development practice.
I hope Jason will be attending The Cable Show in May, he seems like a good fellow to talk to. The full video is worth watching:
I was a little disappointed by the news out of CES last week. While there were certainly a lot of cool devices, like 4K Passive 3D TVs, razor thin OLED HDTVs with actual large screens, etc., a lot of the cooler devices will take a few years to enter the realm of affordability for most consumers. But there were a few announcements I found more immediately interesting, and one, or rather two, of those were the twinannouncements from Sling Media that Broadcom and ViXS are both incorporating their technology into their chip families.
The Broadcom press release specifically mentions the BCM7425. That’s a MoCA 2.0 enabled chip that can simultaneously decode two HD video streams and transcode them for streaming, generally to portable devices. such a chip could be embedded in a set top box, or it could take the form of a standalone network-based transcoder that takes in the default HD streams, which are generally MPEG-2, and transcodes them to H.264 for streaming.
The ViXS press release speaks in more general terms about the XCode chip family. The Sling Media software has been integrated with the ViXS Xtensiv software stack for the XCode chips. The XCode family has varying features; the high-end 5100 can transcode six HD streams simultaneously while the 4200 can transcode dual streams. All of them have Ethernet support, so they could be embedded in an STB or used in a network-based transcoder. They don’t appear to have MoCA support, but a separate MoCA transceiver chip could handle that, as in the TiVo Premiere Elite.
Support for Sling’s streaming technology in these chips opens the door to the potential for SlingLoaded devices from vendors other than EchoStar. I think that would be very interesting. While EchoStar’s own efforts to market SlingLoaded devices haven’t met with much success, to date they’ve been limited to the Dish Network ViP922 DVR in the US and the EchoStar HDS-600RS Freesat+ DVR in the UK, licensing the tech to other vendors could be a more successful approach.
MVPDs have been showing an increasing interest in place shifting technology as a value add to attract customers. Dish, of course, already has the ViP922 and the Sling Adapter for the ViP722. DirecTV has the Nomad ‘store and forward’ network transcoding box. Various MSOs have trialed or tested place shifting hardware. Building it into their STBs, or offering a network-based add-on box to enable streaming, could be a way for MSOs to leverage the market leading Sling technology.
TiVo was showing of a technology demo of just such a box at CES, though there is no indication that Sling Media’s tech was involved. Still, now that EchoStar and TiVo aren’t involved in a blood feud, perhaps they can finally combine their respective best in breed technologies. TiVo’s demo box has a single Ethernet connection and power, it wouldn’t surprise me if it was using one of the ViXS chips. I doubt it is using the Broadcom chip as that’s slated for availability in 3Q12, though if TiVo brings such a unit to market I would very much expect the production version to have MoCA to ease integration with the Premiere Elite and to make it more appealing to their cable MSO partners. I’m hoping to have more to say about what TiVo was showing as CES soon.
Looks like the guys over at Engadget got a chance to play with the Slingplayer app for the Kindle Fire at CES this year.
Thy say the app will hit the Amazon store this month with a not surprising price of $29.00. It looks like it will use the same remote keys as other Android apps, no custom remote skin.
They also mentioned that an embeddable Flash player will be available soon so you can place shift your TV using any webpage you like.
Apparently some folks have already used the Kindle Fire with their Slingbox, using sideloading, from what we have read and is being discussed in our forums here.
Check out Engadget’s review and pics here and let us know what you think if you can.
Appstore today, which is great news if you’re a fan of what Sling offer.
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