Silicondust is giving cord cutters even more choice when it comes to receiving and recording both free over-the-air (OTA) broadcasts and subscription-based, over-the-top (OTT) Premium TV streaming shows. At CES, it announced two new products, the $200 HDHomeRun Scribe Duo, a dual-tuner OTA receiver with a 1TB hard drive, and the $150 HDHomeRun Servio, a 2TB networked DVR.
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These are the first storage-based products from SiliconDust. Previously, users who signed up for the company’s DVR subscription plan had to provide their own network-based storage capacity, whether it was unused space on a laptop or desktop or a dedicated NAS drive. These new storage-based products make what was already a very easy recording setup even easier, and provide an alternative for customers who don’t own (and don’t want to buy) a NAS drive.
The HDHomeRun Scribe Duo gives users 150 hours of ATSC 1080i recording time, or 1,000 hours of OTT streaming media space. Because it’s a dual-tuner receiver, you can watch one program while recording another. The HDHomeRun Servio is an add-on device that provides twice the networked storage capacity of the Scribe, and can be used with any of SiliconDust’s existing OTA receivers, like the HDHomeRun Connect Quatro, or as a way of tripling the storage of the Scribe.
Silicon Dust customers will still need to subscribe to the company’s $35-a-year DVR service in order to take advantage of the recording aspect of these two products, but the Servio comes with a complementary one-year subscription. All SiliconDust content — whether OTA or Premium TV — is managed and viewed through the company’s extensive collection of apps. With support for Windows, Macs, Android, iOS, AndroidTV, tvOS, and many other platforms, there’s almost no limit to how you can watch and record content.
Last year, SiliconDust launched its All-in-One service, which merges its DVR and Premium TV subscriptions into a single product, and these new hard-drive-based products are clearly tailored to help the company’s customers get the most from this package.
For those who prefer a unified media experience with their existing digital library of content, media server company Plex has a Live TV & DVRÂ service too for its Plex Pass subscribers that uses SiliconDust receivers for the OTA portion.
The HDHomeRun Scribe Duo and HDHomeRun Servio will be available later this year, though no date has been announced.
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