Last year, Caavo promised to be the universal remote
to end all other remotes.
Now, after over a year and plenty of updates,
and lots of viewer requests that we check it out,
we bought one.
And I've spent a couple days with it now,
I really put it through its paces,
and I've decided that it's really cool,
right up to a point.
So do I recommend it?
Sorry, not really.
But let's dive in and find out why.
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Thanks everybody for joining us today.
We are going to be talking about the Caavo,
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For the Caavo.
The Caavo itself, just the facts.
It's a $60 box, for the box and the remote, not bad.
Now you can get voice search,
universal voice search across your devices,
you get playlists, you can build playlists
and a few other extra features.
Now for that there's an extra cost.
45 day free trial, then four dollars a month,
or 40 bucks a year, or 120 for a lifetime subscription.
Now the box itself has four HDMI in slots,
that you can use for various devices,
and one HDMI out slot that goes to your TV.
It also has a very powerful,
but frankly kinda terrible remote.
-Terrible.
Yes.
But great.-
[Craig] And it also has these weird teardrop transmitters,
which kind of render the very elegant box, well, inelegant.
Now the reviews that I read before I got this promised
a setup process that would be legendary, life-changing even.
Well, yes and no.
Actually, this review almost didn't happen
because of the setup process.
If you'll indulge my story for just a moment,
first of all, when you plug in the Caavo,
the first screen you see gives you no fewer than four ways
to learn about the setup process.
Watch the video tutorial, live chat, call customer service,
please call customer service!
This set off alarm bells for me
that things weren't going to be as delightful
as those reviews had suggested, and I was right.
The first thing I plugged in was a brand new Fire Stick 4K
straight out of the box, and everything seemed okay,
I was able to set up the Fire Stick,
and the the little picture-in-picture
that the Caavo provides.
But then I hit a wall when the Caavo app
on the Fire Stick kept freezing up.
So after a dozen attempts at solving it on my own,
I gave up and went to bed,
convinced that I would have to scrap this review entirely.
When I came back to it I did factory resets on everything.
The Fire Stick, the Chromecast, even my WiFi Mesh Network.
And after that, I plugged everything back into the Caavo,
and the setup process this time
was a thing of beauty, frankly.
So smooth, it walked me through every step of the process.
So, where was the problem?
Was it my devices?
Was it my network?
Was it the Caavo itself?
Frankly, I have no idea.
But whatever it was,
it means that the Caavo may be one finicky little box.
So just be aware that all those customer support suggestions
may end up coming in handy.
Now once it's up and running though,
how does the Caavo do?
Well, like most things out there, there are pros and cons.
Let's start with what I really like about the Caavo.
The universal remote works seamlessly.
In fact as I was setting it up,
I didn't even need to use the device remotes
during the setup process, for the Fire TV,
or for the Apple TV that I plugged in.
Now the buttons aren't necessarily
gonna work the same across every device.
You can see these buttons down here,
and that can be frustrating, you think,
ah, this is gonna be kinda confusing.
But they've come up with a really clever way
to get around that.
They have touch sensitive features
on these buttons down here that show on-screen,
what that button will do before you press it.
Once you get used to it,
you can actually shut that off if it is annoying to you,
but I love that feature to begin with.
Switching between devices was also pretty seamless.
It automatically switched when I was watching a Fire Stick
and I started a Chromecast Netflix stream on my phone.
So I plugged it in and hit play, and automatically,
the Caavo switched it to that Chromecast stream.
So that's a point in its favor.
No need to wrangle that sort of thing.
Now, the Caavo app that comes with this,
that you can download on your phone
allows for remote monitoring of what someone's watching.
That doesn't mean that you get to watch TV on your phone,
but it does mean you can see what's being played
on the television, gives you a frame every 15 seconds or so.
This is gonna be great for parents for obvious reasons,
you can check in on that.
This doesn't work for live TV, it only works for stuff
that you are are streaming through your on-demand services.
Now the voice search across this is great,
it does work across the different devices,
it isn't quite the same as just using Siri,
or something like that.
You are going to have to learn which commands to use,
but it's not too bad,
you'll get used to it after a little while.
The last thing that I really liked was the playlist feature.
This is similar to something you would get on say, Spotify,
where you can build different playlists,
and put whatever you want in there.
In this case, we're talking about streaming video right?
So I was able to build a list of my favorites,
and put a few titles in there.
Obviously you can build as many of those playlists
as you want and put whatever you want in there.
Again, this is a premium feature just like the voice search,
and so if you wanna do this you are gonna have to pay
that continuing cost of four bucks a month.
Unfortunately, not everything is sunshine and roses,
like I said, I've got a few cons as well.
The universal remote, well, a review on Wired
says that Caavo turns your remotes, your other remotes,
into irrelevant clutter.
Well, kind of.
It depends on the remote actually.
For the Fire TV, or the Roku, sure,
I never had to touch 'em.
But the Apple TV?
The thing about the Apple TV
is the remote is basically what makes the Apple TV great,
and it isn't replaced by the Caavo.
Voice dictation doesn't work on here,
there's no gyroscope inside, so gyroscope dependent games
aren't going to work, typing on the Apple TV,
none of it works quite as well
as what you're getting with that remote.
And so, there were instances where I found myself
a little bit frustrated with this,
especially with that device.
And besides, the remote itself is kinda ugly and boxy,
it's not very pleasant to hold,
it's got this little thing on the back of it
that I'm not sure what it's for.
Also, it appeared at first that loading an app
from the apps list doesn't let me select
which device I want to use, so if I said "Open Hulu"
it took me to the Fire Stick automatically.
But I have it downloaded on both the Apple TV
and the Chromecast, but not on my Fire TV.
So why does it do that,
is that just 'cause it's in the HDMI 1 slot?
Well, kind of.
Because the Fire TV was the first device I set up,
it got the default slot for every app,
but after I dug around a little bit I found out
that you can change that in the settings.
The voice search is another thing
that I wasn't quite satisfied with, like I said,
it does work great, it works across the different apps,
it works across different services,
but it only works with external inputs,
it does not work with a smart TV,
so if you plug the Caavo into a Fire TV,
or a Roku TV, it's not gonna work.
Lastly, and maybe most importantly for some,
the Caavo does not transmit in 4K.
At least it didn't from any of my three 4K devices
that I had plugged in.
And it doesn't work with Dolby Vision either,
but that's a little less relevant to me personally,
it wasn't so offensive to me personally,
but if you have a Dolby Vision capable TV,
that should be a deal-breaker,
because Dolby Vision is amazing,
and if you have the capability,
and your devices aren't letting you take advantage of that,
find a new device.
So, do I recommend Caavo?
Like I said up top, not really, honestly, which is too bad.
I was really excited for it if I'm being honest,
the Caavo is not a bad idea, it's not, in fact,
even a bad execution of an idea necessarily.
In fact, I think it's good,
I just don't think it's good enough.
I don't think that the minor benefits you get here
are worth the ongoing cost.
For instance, how many people even have
this many streaming devices that they need to worry about?
I'm not so sure.
And besides, with modern 4K smart TVs,
most of them have enough HDMI inputs
that you aren't going to have to find, you know,
this device to help you split up those inputs.
The only thing that it's really gonna do
is give you a single remote, which can be nice,
I'm a fan of getting rid of the clutter,
but is that going to be a big enough deal to spend
60 bucks for the box, and four bucks a month ongoing.
Speaking of which, like I said,
the voice search is pretty good,
and I really like the playlist feature.
I like having that built in,
and I wish some other devices would allow for that,
but those premium features,
are they worth that four bucks a month?
I don't think so.
All right everybody, hit the comments below,
let me know what you thought of my review of the Caavo.
Does this change your mind about it?
Do you love it still?
Let me know.
Also give this video a like if you liked it,
a dislike if you hated it, but don't forget to subscribe
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Thanks for watching everybody.
I'll see you next time.