More from CES
Fire TV’s present and future: Last week, I interviewed Marc Whitten, the head of Amazon’s Fire TV business. It was a wide-ranging discussion, but a couple things stood out: First, he claims that Fire TV devices are beating Roku in sales and usage, despite what Roku and some third-party metrics firms claim. Amazon is notoriously cagey about sales figures for any of its products, so even this was an unusual level of specificity. Whitten also said that Amazon hasn’t given up on smart TVs, even though the company didn’t announce any at CES.
Elsewhere in the interview, we talk about the Fire TV’s obnoxious banner ads, potential over-the-air antenna integration, and the idea that streaming video could change the nature of television itself.
HDHomeRun’s hardware and software plans: It’s rare for a company executive to call his own product a “pain in the ass,” but that’s what happened when I talked to Theodore Head, the CEO of HDHomeRun maker SiliconDust. Head was surprisingly cheery about our resoundingly negative review of HDHomeRun’s DVR service, but he promised big improvements to come over the next couple of months.
SiliconDust is also working on a new HDHomeRun tuner with a DVR engine and 250 GB of storage built-in. That’ll spare users the hassle of setting up a separate media server (such as a PC, NAS box, or Nvidia Shield TV), at least until they hit the device’s storage limit. But without a server, users also won’t be able to use some third-party DVR services that work with HDHomeRun tuners, such as Plex and Emby. SiliconDust’s own software will have to do the heavy lifting.
More Catch-Up
|
