OTA

Boxee TV early adopters get 3 months of free service, reduced $10 monthly fee

Boxee TV is already beginning to show up at Wal-Mart, and now there's a good reason to head there sooner, rather than later.

Boxee has released some additional promotional details for early adopters of Boxee TV. If you purchase a Boxee TV during the holiday season, you'll get three months of free month of "No Limits DVR" service, plus you'll get a reduced $10 monthly fee for the lifetime of your subscription.

Early adopters will also get three months of free Netflix, for both new and current subscribers; if you're a current subscriber, three … Read more

Aereo unveils new pricing plans, offers free hour of streaming per day

Aereo survived its early legal battles and now it's taking on the arguably tougher challenge: building its subscriber base.

The company announced a new pricing structure for its streaming over-the-air TV service, adding more subscription options to the original $12/month plan. There's now an $8/month option, which offers all of the same Aereo functionality, except you only get 20 hours of DVR storage, rather than the standard 40 hours. Aereo is also offering a discounted annual option for $80/year, which works out to $6.67/month for full Aereo functionality.… Read more

Simple.TV launches Kickstarter project, offers $300 Roku/antenna bundle

Simple.TV's innovative take on the over-the-air DVR made a splash at CES 2012, winning CNET's Best of CES award in the home theater category. Now the company has turned to Kickstarter, looking to raise $125,000 before the product launches this summer.

While Simple.TV's concept of streaming and recording over-the-air TV hasn't changed (read my initial CES story for more information), Kickstarter is making some attractive bundles available to project backers. For $200, you'll get the Simple.TV box, a full year of advanced EPG data and remote streaming capabilities, a Mohu antenna and a Simple.TV T-shirt -- a pretty good deal, considering the Simple.TV box itself will sell for $150. For $300, Simple.TV will also throw in a Roku XD and a lifetime premium subscription.

When cord-cutting is better than cable

When people ask me if they should "cut the cord" and cancel their cable subscription, I tend to focus on negatives. You're going to miss a lot of sports, reality TV, and live TV events -- even if you get free, over-the-air TV using an antenna.

That's all true, but it's easy to forget that sometimes the cord-cutting experience is just flat-out better than having cable. I was reminded of this after reading a quote by former NBC executive Jeff Gaspin at the end of Bill Carter's recent story about declining TV ratings in The New York Times:… Read more

TiVo lowers monthly fee, increases Premiere storage

Most agree that TiVo's DVRs are among the best available, but the main sticking point for most buyers is always the monthly fee.

TiVo's making it a little easier to get over that hurdle, announcing today that the monthly fee has dropped to $15 a month with a one-year commitment. On the other hand, TiVo has changed the cost of the DVRs themselves as follows: Premiere ($150), Premiere XL ($250), and Premiere Elite ($400). That's a $50 increase for the entry-level Premiere, while the Premiere XL's price has dropped $50 and the Premiere Elite has dropped $… Read more

Has Aereo solved the cord-cutters' dilemma? (hands-on)

It's tempting to think you can ditch your cable subscription, relying instead on a hodgepodge of content sources like Netflix and iTunes, but live TV is harder to replace. Many cord-cutters (including myself) get their live TV using free, over-the-air TV signals, but the hassle of dealing with an antenna and limited DVR options have left over-the-air TV as a niche (albeit seemingly growing) market.

Aereo is a startup looking to make over-the-air TV easier and in February the company announced its $12/month service that lets you stream live and recorded over-the-air TV using an iOS device or … Read more

Aereo brings over-the-air TV to the cloud

The future of over-the-air TV is in the cloud. Or at least that's what Aereo's banking on.

Startup company Aereo held a press conference in New York this morning to announce its new service, which allows subscribers to access live and recorded over-the-air TV on their iPad/iPhone for $12 a month. The service is limited to New York City at launch and will be invitation-only until March 14.

Aereo's subscribers will be able to tune in to live TV on any of the major networks in New York (including CBS, NBC, Fox, ABC, CW, PBS) or … Read more

Hands-on: Simple.TV might be the next big cord-cutting device

LAS VEGAS--Simple.TV's DVR without a hard drive or video output may sound crazy, but it could end up being a killer product for cable-cutters.

That's the impression I got after spending some hands-on time with the over-the-air-friendly DVR, which was already working on an iPad and a Roku 2 XS box in the booth.

To recap from my initial story, Simple.TV allows you to access over-the-air TV programs, either live or stored on a connected hard drive (that you supply), from a number of devices on your home network--at launch there are apps for Roku, Google TV, Boxee, and iPad. So fire up your iPad and you can watch live broadcast TV or any of the recordings on the connected hard drive.… Read more

Simple.TV is a next-gen DVR for the cord-cutting crowd

LAS VEGAS--It's hard to imagine a DVR without a hard drive or a video output, but that's exactly what the new Simple.TV box is.

Designed with cable-cutters in mind, the Simple.TV ($150, available in the spring) is capable of recording over-the-air HDTV and Clear QAM cable, along with traditional DVR functionality like pausing live TV.

What makes Simple.TV's solution interesting, compared with more-traditional DVRs capable of recording over-the-air content (like TiVo and Channel Master TV), is that the Simple.TV box itself doesn't have an HDMI or any kind of video output. Instead, … Read more