Dish's New AirTV Set-Top Box Does Over-the-Air and 4K Streaming (techcrunch.com) 22
On Tuesday, Dish unveiled a new streaming device, the AirTV, which uses Android TV as its base operating system, and provides access to the wealth of Android media apps available. TechCrunch reports: But it's also able to grab over-the-air signals with an antenna for streaming live TV, and it works with Sling TV for a cable-free streaming subscription cord cutting experience. The AirTV also handles 4K, which is good news if you picked one of these up over the holiday shopping season. The 4K support will primarily grab content from Netflix and YouTube apps, but because the underlying platform is Android TV, there are other sources available, which is not necessarily true for other smart TV devices looking to bring more 4K into the living room. It's also not necessary for AirTV users to even use Sling TV, the subscription over-the-top streaming service Dish owns. Which is yet another sign of the changing world that TV and cable providers now find themselves in. The AirTV is also available in both OTA and streaming only hardware configurations, and retails for $129 for the antenna-compatible version, and $99 without.
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Toy (Score:1)
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how the fuck is that streaming (Score:1)
if it's getting a broadcast signal from an antenna, that's not streaming television. thats receiving a broadcast signal with an antenna, like tvs have done since the beginning
do I blame millenials here? someone must be blamed
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Re: No bandwidth legally available. (Score:3)
Not exactly... there's not enough bandwidth to stream 2160p60 that's captured & compressed in realtime for live tv, but 2160p24 would be *totally* achievable with ~19mbps if ATSC allowed h.265 with long GOPs & you did the compression offline.
The REAL reason ATSC doesn't allow 1080p60 is that RAM was *horrifically* expensive back in the early 90s, realtime compression of 1080p60 was still just an engineering fantasy, and both broadcasters & TV manufacturers opposed making it something all receive
Re: No bandwidth legally available. (Score:2)
Also, a CRT capable of only 480i60, 480p60, and 1080p60 can cut corners that would be impossible to cut on a true multisync CRT. I'm not 100% sure, but I think CRT HDTVs line-doubled 480i60 to treat it like 480p60, and padded both to give them 1080i60 timing to avoid the expense & complexity of PC multisync monitors. In other words, most CRT 1080i60 HDTVs displayed ONLY 1080i60, and relied on their scaler to turn 720p60 into 540p60 (the REAL reason why 720p60 appeared to have such low resolution compare
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ATSC A/53 was adopted by the FCC as the US digital TV broadcasting system in 1996.
At the time, there was no standard method to carry 1080p60 10-bit production video. HD Serial Digital Interface (HD-SDI) topped out at 1.5 Gbps.
It wasn't until 1998 that SMPTE standardized 372M Dual link HD-SDI that could have even carried 1080p60. SMPTE 424M that could carry 1080p60 uncompressed in a single 3 Gbps SDI link did not show up until 2005.
Avoid Sling (Score:3)
I'm not clear why Sling is even a part of anything offered by a satellite service, but avoid them.
I just canceled a Sling subscription. There were many reasons, including ignorant support people and awful quality. I would often watch the first half of a show just fine then have it lock up and get an error message telling me to check my Internet connection and fight with my Internet provider. When I would check my Internet connection it was working fine and at the full speed expected and that I had watched the first half of the show with. But the worst offense by Sling in my mind is that they really don't provide the channels that they claim. I had the $25 "Blue" package because there was really nothing that I would watch on the $20 Orange package. But as soon as I signed up I found that I couldn't watch the advertised FXX or National Geographic Wild packages. After much absurd hoop jumping with support I finally got an email telling me that the FXX channel did not provide a "live stream" but that there were a few archived programs that i could watch that might have been shown on FXX once. The same seems to be true for Nat Geo Wild, and it might be the case for other channels that I have not even checked. If you tried to tune into a sports channel that had a game you wanted to see, you wouldn't accept it if the streaming service told you that the game was not available but they had a small set of recorded games from 2014 that you could watch. Why should Sling customers accept this on FXX, Wild or any other advretised channel that is part of the paid package?
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. If you tried to tune into a sports channel that had a game you wanted to see, you wouldn't accept it if the streaming service told you that the game was not available but they had a small set of recorded games from 2014 that you could watch
Hmmm. Was going to go pick up Sling this evening, but this was the exact use-case I was thinking of.
Supposedly, you CAN use Sling to watch NBC Sports [worldsoccertalk.com] live sports channels. I assumed that included the ability to stream NBC Sports Live Extra online (or from mobile devices). It requires login credentials from a provider to do so, where currently I'm supplying my Cox credentials.
Looking a bit more online, I'm seeing someone saying Sling can't do that, but you can do that with PlayStation's VUE [reddit.com]. Any comments
It requires login credentials from a provider (Score:2)
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I went home and checked last night. It is indeed true that NBC Sport Live Extra (that's a mouthful) does not have Sling listed as a provider, but does have PlayStation VUE. I'm going to sign up for the free trial of the latter today and see how it works.
The interesting thing about sports is its the one thing that really loses value if you don't provide it live. It just isn't the same sitting through 2 hours of a competition for which the result is already known, and for which you can't really participate
Still much much better to just build your own (Score:2)