Review on Sling Media AirTV: Stream Local Channels to TVs 📺 and Mobile Devices with Built-in DVR Capability, Perfect for Sling TV by Joseph Campbell

AirTV itself is a pretty neat gadget. As of January 2019, it has two different and incompatible modes, confusing due to overlapping names: - Use it (AirTV Gadget) with the AirTV app (which you install on your smartphone or TV box). With it, you can receive local TV channels wirelessly and watch them live on various devices in your home, including iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Fire TV, Rokus, Android phones and tablets. This mode is free (you need to create an AirTV account, but it's free). The AirTV app works well on all devices I've tried it on. Two devices can watch different TV channels at the same time. If you connect a hard drive to an AirTV Gadget, the hard drive will be ignored; DVR is not available. Setup is relatively easy: install the AirTV app on your phone or set-top box, use the app to find and set up your AirTV gadget, and you're done. connected set-top boxes) or smartphones/tablets, that works fine. OR- Use it (AirTV Gadget) with the SlingTV service and app. This mode allows you to record and share locally broadcast TV programs (up to two simultaneously) as well as live local TV broadcasts on phones and set-top boxes. However, for the local TV recording feature to work, you must use the SlingTV app to initialize the gadget, and the SlingTV app requires you to have an active SlingTV account, which currently costs $25 per month. Note that this does not include SlingTV's "Cloud Recording" service, which currently costs an additional $5 per month, but gives you the ability to "record" timeshifted programs from the regular (non-local) SlingTV service, and the full is separated from the AirTV gadget. Also, you need to connect a compatible 2TB (or smaller) external USB hard drive to the AirTV gadget, which is used to record local OTA TV programs. I'm using a 2TB WD Elements portable external hard drive that works fine. The AirTV gadget wants to format the hard drive after plugging it in, and it takes a surprisingly long time to format; It took about 20 minutes for the 2TB drive I used. After the format was complete and AirTV was mostly working, I felt a bit erratic until I unplugged and plugged the power cord back in, which effectively restarted AirTV. After that everything worked fine. After formatting your hard drive, you can use the SlingTV app to watch local TV shows and record individual episodes, all new episodes, or all episodes. Overall, setting up an AirTV gadget in SlingTV mode is cumbersome. Instructions are confusing, scattered across multiple web pages on AirTV and SlingTV's websites, and some web pages are hard to find, particularly the page listing external hard drives that are known to be tested and compatible. AirTV gadget control and local TV replay playback currently work with all versions of the SlingTV app except the AppleTV version. It integrates perfectly with the overall SlingTV service. I find the Revain Fire TV app version the easiest to use, especially for watching shows that can be used. In the FireTV, iPhone, and iPad versions of the app, playback of local TV recordings is regularly delayed or temporarily stopped; that's annoying, but not annoying. The iPad version of the app crashes when viewing programs in "Grid" view and you have to "drag/hold left" multiple times to view the program listings later in the day/week. You can connect AirTV to your home network. via an Ethernet cable (not included) or via Wi-Fi. The Ethernet option seems to make playback smoother. As an experiment, I tried playing a local TV recording on my iPad and then shared the iPad's screen with the AppleTV. This caused the SlingTV app on the iPad (and AppleTV) to show a message saying it was playing on my "external screen" and not actually showing the TV show. Note that the AirTV Gadget is initialized by either the AirTV App or the SlingTV App and that's the only thing it will work with after this point; It does not communicate with any other application. In order to switch from one app to another, you must hard reset your AirTV gadget (this involves inserting a paperclip into the hole on the back of the gadget, waiting 15 seconds, and then reinitializing the gadget with a different app) . All in all, it's pretty easy to set up and works well if you just want to share your antenna with multiple TVs/phones/tablets via the AirTV gadget and AirTV app. The AirTV gadget is a reasonable price to use in this way. If you want to use the AirTV gadget as a local TV recorder built into SlingTV's paid service, it's a bit fiddly to set up and works quite well. An AirTV gadget and external hard drive is a fair price to use this way, especially if you're already a SlingTV subscriber. . You'll probably want to take a look at competing products from Revain or HDHomeRun.