This week on TechHive: The surprisingly subdued CES for cord-cutting
Last year’s CES was a fruitful event for cord-cutting. At the tech industry’s biggest trade show, companies like Tablo and Mohu announced radical new uses for over-the-air antennas, while bigger companies including Amazon and Roku made their own splashy announcements.

The story was different at CES 2018. Several of those companies didn’t show up at the trade show at all, while others only brought vague promises of future products with nothing to demo. As a result, CES wasn’t the showcase for novel cord-cutting solutions that last year’s show appeared to be.

Still, I managed to keep busy during the show, and plan to have a lot more coverage up next week, including interviews with Amazon, Hulu, SiliconDust. In the meantime, read up on why this year’s show was quieter than the last.

Weekly Rewind

Post-vacation catch-up: Although I was on vacation last week, a few of my pieces did go up on TechHive in the meantime:

  • A review of SiliconDust’s HDHomeRun DVR service, whose software is a letdown compared even though the hardware is excellent. (At CES, SiliconDust told me a major overhaul is coming, which I’ll talk about next week.)
  • A review of the Samsung SmartThings Link, a $40 USB dongle that turns the Nvidia Shield TV streaming box into a smart home hub. While it’s cheaper than Samsung’s full-sized hub, it does make a few small trade-offs.
  • My first column of 2018, which looks at the things I’d like to see from cord-cutting this year.

Nvidia’s sly smart TV plans: Technically, Nvidia did not announce any smart TVs at CES. Instead, the company announced a set of 65-inch monitors that it’s calling Big Format Gaming Displays. Built by Acer, Asus, and HP—but all using the same 4K HDR panel—they’re supposed to bring high-end PC gaming into the living room.

But if you look past the gaming elements, Nvidia’s BFGDs could become the best smart TVs that money can buy when they arrive in the second half of this year. Their display quality rivals some of the best televisions from companies like Samsung, they use a fancy variable refresh rate technology that no other television has yet, and they have the guts of an Nvidia Shield TV—arguably the best media streamer on the market today—built in. This is one of the more impressive things I saw at the show.

More Catch-Up

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Thanks for reading!

My apologies for the unusually late newsletter this week. I took a red-eye home from Las Vegas last night, and my body’s still running on Pacific time, but I’m looking forward to sharing more of what I learned at the show with you soon.

As always, you can contribute to this newsletter through Patreon (for recurring donations), and through Ko-Fi (for one-time donations). And for feedback or any topics you’d like me to cover, just reply to this email or find me on Twitter.

Until next week,
Jared