I'm a Roku supporter, we have multiple Roku streaming sticks and Roku enabled TV's and Sling TV streaming service used across two households. Seeing how Sling and AirTV are both DISH subsidiaries, I had high hopes they would work well together. I was not disappointed.
I connected the AirTV box directly to my home router and my external antenna (which is up in the attic, a RCA Yagi 70 mile directional antenna). The Sling App found the AirTV box, did a scan and found 67 channels, I was told there would only be 54 in my area... Kudos to the antenna and the AirTV tuner sensitivity. I'm 30 miles from the towers with a direct line of sight. Most of the channels came in at 4 out of 5 bars. This was with guessing the antenna alignment. I did not see a need to tweak the alignment and rescan to find if I can improve the signal. I may change my mind if the rain/snow interferes with the signal broadcast.
The OTA channels integrated very nicely along with the Sling channels, what I really liked was that the major broadcasters, ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX were all placed at the top of the channel listing. Having the OTA symbol next to the channel name helps in identifying which are OTA and which are Sling provided.
I then tried to get the DVR working, but no luck. I tried 3 different external drives and none were recognized.
After a bit more reading on the AirTV web site, I found where the minimum required firmware and software versions were listed. The AirTV box firmware was very old, it had not updated even though the Sling App said it was current.
It was late, so I was going to do a hard reset in the morning, but overnight it did an auto-update of the firmware and it was now newer than the minimum required version. After plugging in my test 80GB drive, the Sling app found it and formatted it. I now have a whopping 10 hours of recording time :-)
I have a 2TB drive on order, so when that arrives I'll plug it in and have hundreds of hours of OTA recording. My wife will be very happy.
So if you have troubles with the DVR service, check the firmware and software versions to make sure they meet the minimum requirements. If not, wait a while like I did or do a hard reset on the AirTV box, that should update the firmware.
I have only completed a few simple tests with the DVR capabilities. If I start recording a live show, I can then pause it, rewind, fast-forward the show. If I run into any issues, I'll update this review.
For streaming, I was able to stream both tuners internally around the house with no noticeable issues. I then streamed the same channel to a local TV and to my cellphone over the cellular network which tested the 1 upstream capability. After about 30 seconds of a kind of jittery playback, the upstream viewing stabilized and worked great. My home upstream connection is limited to 1Mb/s and the AirTV supported that just fine. The local stream was a few seconds ahead of the remote stream, but both were stable. Now we can watch local OTA channels when we're at our vacation place in the mountains.
I'm very happy with the AirTV black box + Sling TV running on Roku sticks/TV's.
This is a strong contender to allow me to drop my VERY expensive DirecTV service. With this setup, we get over 90% of the channels we currently watch/record on DirecTV at 1/5th the cost... ($1400/year savings if I drop DirecTV)
Sure, it doesn't have all the recording options or features of DirecTV, but it's pretty close with the Cloud DVR and now OTA DVR with AirTV. The missing DirecTV channels are not that important and by adding in another of the Sling TV Extra packages for $5/month, I can get most of those as well.
Now I would like to see Sling integrate Netflix, Hulu, Amazon prime into their app, so I can have one place to view them all...
| Brand Name | Sling Media |
|---|---|
| Item Weight | 1 pounds |
| Product Dimensions | 7 x 4.3 x 1.7 inches |
| Item model number | 214877 |
| Batteries | 1 AA batteries required. |
| Is Discontinued By Manufacturer | No |
| Color Name | Black |
