hey everybody it's Lon Seidman and we are back with our cord cutting & cord
shaving series where we look at ways you can reduce the cost of bringing live
television into your home we can still use our cable company without their
equipment so we can save on rental fees or we can get rid of the cable company
altogether and bring in over-the-air content and one platform we haven't
spent a lot of time on recently is the Apple TV platform and I just got done
reviewing the new 4k box here and I figured I would take a look at what some
of the cord cutting and cord shaving solutions are available on the Apple TV
platform which we're going to explore today now I do want to mention in the
interest of full disclosure that one of the tuning devices that we use here in
the house for all of this cord shaving stuff is made by a company called
silicon dust it's called the HD home run they are an occasional sponsor here on
the channel they are not paying for this review however I also want to let you
know that we're going to be looking at an app called channels and they provided
me some free codes to try out their app here on both the Apple TV and on iOS
devices and we're also going to be taking a look at Plex which we've talked
about quite a bit in the past as well and Plex is an occasional sponsor here
on the channel too but they're not sponsoring this video so all the
opinions you're about to hear are my own and no one has reviewed this content
before it was uploaded and again this is not a sponsored video I do suggest you
check out a video I recently uploaded about my entire setup so you can get a
feel for the context of how all these different devices work together
specifically how the HD homerun tuners work in a nutshell what I've got here
on my network is an HD homerun Prime in the closet I have a cable card connected
into it for my cable company and it brings in all of my cable TV content it
makes it available to anything that's compatible including in this case the
Apple TV and it works really well and I got all of Comcast's equipment out of
the house and I talked a lot more about that in that other video so we're gonna
kick things off with the first app of the three we're going to look at which
is the channels app and this is something we looked at a little while
ago but they've made some additions to it that I think are worth talking about
so this costs $24.99 on the App Store it works with your HD homerun and what you
got here when you first load it up is the on now guide which gives you a bunch
of thumbnails here about what's currently on TV I know a lot of people
want a channel guide a more traditional guide and that's one thing that they bring to
the mix here is an actual channel guide that you can scroll through like you
might on your cable box this is a patented thing they don't own the patent
to it but they're clearly paying a licensing fee to get at it so it's a
more of a traditional interface and what you might have seen from some of the
other things that we've looked at recently here on the channel and it does
seem to be working pretty nicely here there's also a version for iOS your iPad
and your iPhone that version has a similar interface to what you see here
on the TV screen that version costs $14.99 but you buy it once and it works
on all of your devices so if you have multiple Apple TVs in the house you
spend 25 bucks to start it'll work on all the Apple TVs that you have and if
you want to watch something on one of these channels you just click the button
here and tune to the live TV and you're off and running there's also some time
shifting you can do while watching live TV so for example I can I hit the pause
button here and kind of rewind to earlier parts in the broadcast if I want
to do that so out of the box a pretty useful app here with a very very nice
interface that feels very tightly integrated with the rest of what you
might encounter on your Apple TV really slick I really nicely put together so
nice filtering here too for narrowing things down by HD or SD you can even set
favorites on your HD homerun device itself so that only the 5 or 6 channels
you watch most often can appear on here there's also some search functionality
and some other things too so all in a really really nice interface here and
definitely I think the best of the bunch right now as far as what you can find on
the Apple TV platform now what they've also done though recently is added in a
DVR feature and this DVR works a lot like the other DVRs we've looked at over
the last couple of months in that you have to have something on your network
to run the DVR software on in my case I'm using my WD My cloud PR 2100 that's
the same device right now that's running my plex server as well as my HD homerun
DVR server that we're using on the Android boxes and this is another
piece of software to install but it works in a very similar fashion so right
now it's installed on my device I'll show you some of the settings to it I
can go over here to my past recordings for example and if I want to load up
Daniel Tiger's neighborhood here I can go ahead and just click watch and it
will queue it up from the DVR server running on that WD my cloud
device works pretty similar to how you see other things working you can
fast-forward and rewind you can also dig into that channel guide for example and
set up things to record later so maybe I want to watch I don't know BBC World
News later this evening I can click on that future thing that's coming up I can
record it I also have the opportunity to create a season pass so every new
episode gets recorded and you have some other options here as well to do some
padding on the broadcast before they start so a lot of the basic DVR features
are here on this one they also have a pretty neat way of allowing you to watch
things while they're still recording so that's something you can do of course on
the HD homerun DVR natively you can do it on here too so if I click on law &
order it says hey you're currently recording it right now you want to watch
where you are live or do you want to watch the beginning of it while I record
the end and I can of course watch the recording here and you can see here this
purple progress indicator gives me an idea as to how much I have available to
me to watch and then it's going to keep recording for the next 42 minutes or so
until that show is over so you can jump ahead and then when you get to where
it's live it'll just start playing the live broadcast as it continues to record
us a lot of nice time shifting features built into this a pretty fully
functional DVR in my opinion and it seems to be working pretty nicely here
on the platform the DVR is not free it's an additional $8 a month that covers the
cost of them bringing in this channel guide information I would imagine some
of the patent costs involved with that are also part of that that's something
that costs these developers money to provide to you and that is why you have
to pay that fee the only other issue that I'm encountering at the moment with
this is that it doesn't work on platforms other than the Apple platform
so the iPhone and the Apple TV and the iPad for example are the only places
where this DVR currently works although they do have a web version that you can
log into both on your network and remotely to watch that content on any
other device let me show you what that looks like so here is the web version of
their DVR and you can see we've got the similar-looking guide here on the web
page this will work on anything that has a web browser and if I wanted to for
example to tune into a channel here we can go to the Weather Channel and then
I'll click on watch now and it will start playing here this is coming over
the network from my let me just turn the volume down here for a second
this is coming over the network from my WD my cloud right now and the server
that runs this DVR it works in a very similar to way to what we've seen with
Plex and that a can transcode video it's taking the large video it's getting over
the cable transmission and making it smaller so if I'm off-site I can watch
it at a more compressed and maybe lower resolution in order to work with a
cellular network for example so it's able to do all of that real-time
transcoding and if you have a processor on the device that's running this server
it can be a computer or a NAS vice like I have as long as it's compatible
with quick sync which is an Intel Hardware encoding technology it's on
many chips you'll get hardware encoding for this as well so they've really done
a lot of nice work making this work here of course you can go fullscreen with
this if you want you can also stop that you also have the ability to go back
into your DVR recordings here and play back stuff that you've already recorded
so here's that Daniel Tiger's neighborhood episode and I can of course
click watch now and I'd be able to watch that remotely and if you have the app
running on your phone or on your tablet you can access the server remotely
through the app itself without having to go through that web interface to get
there so all your DVR recordings and all your live TV can be transcoded on the
fly through your computer or whatever device you're using to serve content out
and you can watch it while you're on the road I did a test with it earlier I've
got no signal down here in the basement with my cellular provider but I did test
it upstairs I was able to successfully transcode a 1080i broadcast down the
720p at around 4 megabits per second and was able to sustain a pretty decent
signal throughout as I was watching remotely without being on my local Wi-Fi
pretty cool stuff and it looks like the recording engine they had for this DVR
is compatible with a number of different platforms so Mac and Windows if you got
an old laptop or something kicking around you can also use docker if you're
into that Synology qnap WD My cloud Netgear they've got a pretty substantial
compatibility list here that I think you'll find something that you've got
kicking around the house to run that DVR server so all in the channels app here
looks pretty nice nice slick interface it really integrates nicely with the
Apple TV platform as well as the iPhone and iPad platforms too - a great app we've
looked at it in the past and the DVR looks like it's maturing very
nicely and working quite well one thing I want to bring up and I bring this up
on all the videos that we do is something called DRM that your cable
provider might put on your channels where I am Comcast just puts the DRM on
HBO and Showtime and some of the premium networks but some folks have cable
systems that lock down everything so even though you're paying for that cable
subscription and getting the cable card it still doesn't work with this
configuration because the channels are marked as DRM and therefore don't work
with a lot of these platforms channels does not yet support DRM content but
they are promising to do so in the future according to their FAQ so if you
are dealing with DRM across your entire cable system probably not going to work
for you right now but it will work with cable systems like mine that don't DRM
everything as well as over-the-air broadcasts so the next app on our tour
is the InstaTV app and this will work with your HD home run to notice like the
channels app did but it also works with the HD homerun DVR that's the same
package we reviewed a number of times here on the channel and what I use is my
primary DVR here in the house so although silicon dust at the moment
doesn't have a Native Client for their devices or DVR instaTV will work with
the silicon dust hardware and their DVR software and again check out my prior
videos to see more about that so I can go through my recordings on here for
example so I can play back this episode of Nova that I've got here and it shows
me all the different nova recordings that i have stored i can load up extreme
animal weapons here and then play it back now you'll notice here that it's
not playing in full-screen and the reason it's not playing in full-screen
is because i haven't unlocked full screen playback for DVR recordings that
cost fifteen dollars so the app is free but this is the kind of functionality
you'll get with it after you pay the 15 bucks you can unlock for full screen
playback and get it the app also runs on the iphone and ipad but you do have to
make a separate in-app purchase to get full screen playback on those devices as
well so let's quit out of here real quick and we'll jump back to the rest of
the interface here and oh what we can also do is see what's on live TV so I can go
scroll down for example back to the weather channel here and play back the
Weather Channel as it's currently airing and we'll let that start going here and
I do have the ability to do some I'm shifting here so I can pause the
show here and rewind a little bit there's a tiny little icon you have to
navigate over to here to kind of zip back into the recording and then you can
rewind live TV if you want the interface is not as intuitive as what you just saw
on the channels app or HD homerun's own application for that matter but it does
give you the ability to have a single DVR system running on your network to be
able to watch what you're looking to watch on here the one thing I don't
think this does as well though is setting up recordings that are happening
in the future so if I scroll down through all this stuff here this is just
the things that are currently on TV I don't believe there's a way I can search
for recording things later on so I can play back recorded content I can
watch live content but I can't set up new DVR recordings on here I'd have to
do that on silicon dust's own software first I should also mention that the HD
homerun DVR software does cost thirty five dollars a year and that pays for
all of your program guide information and everything else to keep that
software working and you'll get updates of course as they make them on there and
the last option we're going to look at on this tour is Plex and of course we've
talked about Plex quite a bit here on the channel just about every month or so
and if you have a Plex pass subscription you will get access to live TV as well
as their DVR feature now the Plex pass costs about five bucks a month but you
can also get an annual pass for $39.99 or do a lifetime pass for 149 dollars
and never have to pay again and then when you have a client that
supports live TV or the DVR you'll start to see a live TV icon show up after
you've configured the DVR on the Plex side of things now Plex does require you
to install a server I've covered all this in the past so I'll link to my big
plex series so you can see exactly how it works but just like what we saw with
the channels app DVR Plex runs on just about anything out there
for a server too so I think you shouldn't have a problem finding
something to act as your Plex server so we're gonna go over here into live TV
and we'll scroll back over to the Weather Channel maybe what it does is it
gives you a list of everything that's currently on the air I can click on the
Weather Channel here it will then tune in and start watching that what it does
do is it runs all of the inbound TV through the plex server first where it
transcodes it and then puts it back out on
the network so it might be a little slower than what you saw with the channels app
or insta TV but generally things come up right away and you can start watching TV
on this thing now at the time that I'm recording this video you cannot control
the DVR recordings from the Apple TV itself you have to load up a smartphone
like a iPhone or an Android phone use Plex through there to set up your
recordings but after the show is done airing you can go back and watch the
show on your Apple TV here so I've got a bunch of DVR recordings that I've made
on it and I can play all of these back whenever I want but you have to wait
until the recording is done there is some time shifting capability with this
also on the live TV but it's disconnected from the recording so for
example if we go back over here to the Weather Channel what I can do is pause
live TV while it's airing and then rewind in that broadcast but I can't
come back to this later or set it to record while it's on-air here so I can
hit the pause button here it will start queuing up whatever's happening after
that I can rewind and fast-forward but once I leave this show and pick another
one that little buffer it kept is gone after that so if I had to choose one of
these three right now as the best Apple TV live TV and DVR experience I would have to say the channels app it will cost you a little bit more than some of the
other solutions we've looked at but it is probably the most elegant in so far
as how well it integrates with the Apple TV the only downside to it is that it
doesn't work easily on other platforms unless you pull up that web interface
that I demonstrated earlier but if you have an Apple TV and have an iPhone and
an iPad and those are your primary devices the experience is actually very
good right now with channels they've invested a lot of the money they're
making from these apps and their services to make this a really mature
platform and it's come a long way since I first started looking at it so I'm
quite pleased with that now as everything in this space goes we'll
probably see updates and things change over time so we'll probably revisit the
Apple TV in a few months and see what the state of everything is I'm sure Plex
will start adding some additional features in and we might see the same on
insta TV too so there are options you've got a bunch of them and there are a few
things that I haven't covered here on the channel part of the problem that I
have where I live is that I can't get anything over-the-air
I have tried but I get like one channel so it's hard for me to review some of
these other solutions that rely only on over-the-air content what's nice about
the HD homerun is that it works the same for cable as it does over-the-air so
even though we were watching a demonstration working off my cable
system if you have one of the HD homerun over-the-air antennas your experience
would be exactly the same here so that's going to do it for the Apple TV overview
let me know down in the comments below if there are things that I missed that I
should be looking at and also let me know what over-the-air solutions you
have found that work well with your Apple TV as well this is Lon Seidman
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