Channel Master Bows Stream+ Media Player With Android TV, Dual ATSC 1.0 Tuners
Channel Master is announcing “upcoming availability” Tuesday of Stream+, a coffee-cup-size media player that integrates streaming services and games with live broadcast TV and includes an on-screen channel guide with DVR capability to pause, rewind and record live TV, the company said. Channel Master’s online store immediately will begin taking preorders for the Stream+ at the special introductory price of $99, but “actual” retail pricing will be announced in mid-January when inventories of the product become available, said the company.
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The Stream+ runs on the Android TV platform and has dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Ethernet connectivity, integrated voice search, a quad-core CPU for advanced gaming, and two built-in ATSC 1.0 tuners with a MicroSD storage option for DVR, and USB 3.0 for personal media use and future options, Channel Master said. A Live Channels app installs automatically during the Stream+ setup process to add over-the-air (OTA) broadcast TV channels into a “graphical guide,” and installing a MicroSD storage card activates the Live Channels DVR setup process, said the company. The dual 1.0 tuners enable a viewer to watch one OTA program while recording another, or record two live programs at the same time while watching a recorded program or using a streaming service, Joe Bingochea, executive vice president-product development, told us.
The device has all the features of Channel Master’s existing DVR+ product, but its added built-in Android TV “gives you access to the Google Play store with all the apps,” said Bingochea. The Stream+ also is compatible with Google Play apps that are capable of delivering 4K content with HDR10 high dynamic range, he said.
“Year over year, since 2009, our business has grown, and a lot of that I attribute to cord cutting,” said Bingochea. He thinks the number of cord-cutting homes is on the rise, he said. “Our sales continue to increase.” Contrary to TiVo reports showing a slight dip in the cord-cutting trend in Q3 (see 1712130008), “we haven’t seen anything to suggest it has slowed down in the last quarter, as far as our business is concerned, ” he said.
For the cord-cutting phenomenon as a whole, “there is no consumer advocate, and that’s kind of where we’re trying to step in,” said Bingochea. Some customers “are using Sling TV, some people are just using Google, some people are just using Amazon,” he said. “All of our customers are using an antenna. What I can tell you from all of those customers that we’ve sold to, which is hundreds of thousands of them, is there’s not one consistent pattern of streaming services that they’re supplementing their OTA with. It’s all different.” Bingochea still sees long-term viability in the OTA business, he said. “I think there’s still some life left in OTA,” even though the major broadcast networks are becoming available in over-the-top formats, he said.
Channel Master sold more than 500,000 coupon-eligible converter boxes during the DTV transition, and many of them still exist, said Bingochea. “What’s interesting is, we’re getting a lot of calls from customers now that their remotes are dying, and so they want to replace the remotes now for some of those boxes,” he said. “So there’s a lot of them out there. We’ve had some boxes fail, but they’re still out there.”
That so many DTV converter boxes have survived for the years since the analog service went dark “was really surprising to me,” said Bingochea. “I thought that the number of televisions that were going to be replaced over the last five to seven years would’ve gone up and some of those analog tuners would’ve gone away. Our historic demographic that we’ve sold to are your boomers, and they’re not changing out their TVs. They have an old set and they’re going to use it.”