AirTV review: Send live TV broadcasts all over your house—and to your mobile devices, too

You don’t have to pay for cable or satellite tv for pc TV simply to look at the native associates of the printed networks ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, and PBS. You simply want an antenna. And if you happen to add an AirTV to your Wi-Fi community, one antenna is all you’ll have to ship these reside broadcasts to a number of TVs in your own home—and to cellular screens wherever you may get on the web.

A brand new viewing possibility from the parents behind Dish Community satellite tv for pc TV, AirTV was formally launched in Might with simply that talent set, a promise this author discovered compelling. After a number of weeks of working with the $120 field and ironing out some kinks, I’m nonetheless just about impressed, albeit with some caveats.

Don’t confuse AirTV with its sibling, the AirTV Participant. The latter field is designed to meld Dish’s Sling TV over-the-top TV service with over-the-air TV broadcasts on a single TV through HDMI. AirTV doesn’t have HDMI. It distributes the video streams from its twin ATSC tuners over your house community.

Any community system able to operating both the AirTV or Sling TV app can pull in these streams. At launch, that features Roku, Amazon Fireplace TV, Android TV, and tvOS units in addition to Android and iOS smartphones and tablets. Dish intends to broaden to different platforms down the street, together with Apple TV. The corporate additionally plans so as to add a DVR characteristic, so that you’ll have the ability to file video to an up-to-2TB USB storage system (a characteristic its sibling already has).

A profitable AirTV deployment will depend on mounting a TV antenna within the location of your house that has the perfect broadcast TV reception. That was powerful in my city dwelling, the place alerts are blocked by taller buildings. Even with an amplified indoor antenna, the Channel Grasp SMARTenna+ ($89 at Channel Master), the AirTV couldn’t pull in my native ABC and PBS associates—nor may it nab all of the quirky broadcast-only channels that occupy leftover bandwidth in digital TV land.

A mast-mounted rooftop antenna pointed northwest in direction of the town’s dominant antenna farm has at all times been a greater resolution for me. So the parents at Dish advisable I strive their $149 professional rooftop installation option, which features a Televes DigiNova Boss powered antenna ($100 at Amazon, if you wish to set up it your self).

Jonathan Takiff / IDG

After working a professional-grade sign meter, the Dish techs opted to level the Televes due north somewhat than northwest, to nab further digital channel alerts they’d tracked bouncing off and round high-rises. (Multipath distortion can be put to good use!)  So now I’m pulling in 34 non-duplicating digital stations on the AirTV, 50 % greater than the 22 I obtained with the Channel Grasp SMARTenna+. Three PBS channels returned from the misplaced with the Televes. Traditional-TV and -movie channels similar to Antenna TV, Comet, Motion pictures!, Tuff TV, COZI, Many years, Retro, Escape, Grit, and MeTV additionally turned newly tunable and/or extra secure.

Pulling sturdy and secure alerts into the AirTV is barely half the battle, nonetheless; maximizing the attain of your Wi-Fi community is equally necessary for an excellent image to materialize on the display. All alerts exiting the AirTV field are directed first to your house community router, after which out to your Rokus, Fireplace TVs, iPads, and smartphones.

My residence has 4 TVs distributed between three flooring, and I put in the AirTV on the highest flooring the place it was closest to the roof-mounted antenna. My router—a Comcast Xfinity XB3 cable-modem/router combo—is 2 flooring down, which proved to be too far. Channels had been gradual to alter, there have been periodic audio dropouts, and pictures had been pixelated and out and in of focus because of erratic bit-rate changes. So I took benefit of the ethernet port on the again of the AirTV and used powerline community adapters as a substitute of Wi-Fi.

AirTV

That eradicated 90 % of the visible artifacts I used to be getting with a strictly wi-fi connection on three of my 4 take a look at TVs. I discovered that my two high-end Roku packing containers carried out higher than the mid-range Amazon Fireplace TV for each HD and SD channels. It wasn’t fairly HD cable-TV high quality, and it was definitely much less pristine than the uncompressed high quality that comes straight from an over-the-air tuner, but it surely was shut sufficient for viewing consolation.

Sadly, my fourth setup—a higher-end Fireplace TV feeding an LG OLED, situated in my residence’s weakest Wi-Fi reception space—continued to flash a “no sign out there” message earlier than buffering for 5 to 30 seconds after which lastly displaying a stream. This setup would proceed to drop frames for an additional minute or two earlier than it lastly settled down, largely.

It’s value noting which you could at the moment set up just one AirTV field in your community. And if somebody is utilizing certainly one of that field’s tuners to stream TV outdoors the community—I attempted this at a pal’s home and was impressed—then just one stream may be carried inside it. An AirTV product supervisor informed me of plans to gang a number of packing containers collectively to get round this restrict, however one should marvel if the standard residence Wi-Fi community would have the bandwidth for it.

Jonathan Takiff / IDG

This system information

Whether or not you utilize the AirTV app or the SlingTV app, which integrates choices from the paid streaming TV service, you’ll get a free program information exhibiting what the native associates are broadcasting. Each guides are fairly polished and clean operating, with colourful station logos and present photos dressing up the menus, however they’re a step backwards for customers spoiled by this system guides cable and satellite tv for pc TV operators provide.

Channel lineups aren’t numbered for direct entry by punching numbers on a distant, as an example; in actual fact, AirTV doesn’t have a distant. You utilize the streaming field’s distant, or—if you happen to’re utilizing a cellular system—you utilize the app and the system’s touchscreen. In both case, discovering what you wish to watch typically requires tedious scrolling by means of the on-screen guides or filtering content material filtered by sort: leisure, sports activities, youngsters, information, life-style, and so forth.

Utilizing voice instructions to alter channels can be greatest, and this method may provide that sometime. You should utilize the AirTV Participant’s microphone-equipped distant to summon YouTube content material on that system. However once more, the AirTV doesn’t have a distant.

Is it worthy?

A pair different operational points likewise demand conduct modification. Shut the AirTV or SlingTV app on a Roku or Fireplace TV (switching, say, to Netflix) isn’t any downside. However if you return to the over-the-air information, you’ll end up on this system information’s opening display. The service doesn’t bounce again to the final channel you had been watching, as typical TV tuners and set-top packing containers do.

Just a few days after I groused about this to an organization exec, a software program replace midway addressed my grievance: Tapping on the Dwelling Display now restarts the information within the channel neighborhood you had been final visiting. And whereas browsing, the information amasses a brief checklist of just lately watched channels for quick re-tuning. The method of establishing an inventory of favourite channels stays a piece in progress. You possibly can populate a brief My Favorites checklist with paid Sling TV channels, however not with broadcast channels.

So AirTV isn’t good, however its in- and out-of-home TV-streaming characteristic is one thing extra generally related to costly cable and satellite tv for pc service. Will probably be even higher when its DVR characteristic is enabled.