Dish's New AirTV Set-Top Box Does Over-the-Air and 4K Streaming (techcrunch.com)

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.

Comments

Avoid Sling

[frovingslosh]

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?

Re: No bandwidth legally available.

[Miamicanes]

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 receivers *had* to be capable of decoding. Most broadcasters were totally in the 'interlaced' camp, and even 720p60 was a tough sell to CRT manufacturers (I think Monivision made one of the very, very few 32"+ 720p60-native TVs). Why? Because 1080i60 is equivalent to 540p60 as far as a CRT is concerned, and not much more demanding than 480p60 (~34MHz bandwidth vs ~31MHz bandwidth). However, 720p60 required ~45MHz, and 1080p60 would have required a staggering ~65MHz of bandwidth... simply put, a CRT capable of 1080p60 would have been VERY expensive compared to one that can only do 480i60, 480p60, and 1080i60.