Wednesday, June 8, 2016

How about a little love for OTA DVR gear?

I cut cable TV long ago, and the vast majority of my TV time is fed by streaming services at this point (primarily, in no particular order, Netflix, HBO Now, CrunchyRoll, and Funimation).  However, there's still the odd something I like to grab from over-the-air broadcasts... problem being, watching broadcast TV requires watching on a schedule, and who does that these days?  If only somebody made a cheap-but-solid DVR, that would be the way to go.

Of course, nothing's ever that simple... most DVRs I've run across either don't support over-the-air broadcasts at all, or are saddled with obscene subscription fees.  Some years back, I thought I had found an answer with the first round of Simple.TV hardware, but not so much (here's their story, frankly I'm surprised they're still around in any way, shape, or form).  Then, the folks at Microsoft released an over-the-air tuner for their XBox One, with a promise of DVR functionality "coming soon"... I bought a tuner on release day, and have been patiently waiting, keeping track of what little news I could find.  Heck, as recently as March, I had news that the feature was in testing, stoking my hopes that it would finally come soon.

Yeah, you'd think I would have learned by now, but a promise by a corporation isn't worth the paper it's not written on.  I don't know if it's because of some major bugaboo that cropped up in testing, or maybe some back-room deal with... who?  At any rate, development is officially "on hold" now, while the resources on that project are redistributed to other XBox and Windows 10 projects... and if you think that "on hold" means anything other than the project is dead for this generation of hardware, I wish I had a bridge to sell you.