I really wanted to love my Simple.TV. The premise behind it was so simple, just like the name. The premise of Simple.TV is to essentially create a DVR server that can serve up television to any device with a web browser or a Simple.TV app. It’s just a standard tuner. No cablecard or anything like that. Also, bring your own harddrive. It can stream in HD quality to your local network or anywhere else, bridging functionality of a TiVo and a Slingbox together, except… more simple… That would be great if it worked, but it actually doesn’t work. By “it doesn’t work,” I don’t mean that it isn’t good enough. I mean it actually doesn’t work.
I really wanted to like Simple.TV. I backed them on Kickstarter, ordering two units. I live in San Francisco, but being a Los Angeles native, I wanted to install one of these in my parents’ house so I could stream Lakers games up here, and I planned to install one here. When the Engadget review came out, I thought they were way too harsh. Heck… I was so excited to receive my Simple.TV that I even made an unboxing video. That’s how lame I am!
After I unboxed it, it was time to set it all up! The process of plugging everything in is quite simple. It has a coax passthrough so if you’re already using something like a TiVo, which I am, you can pass coax into the Simple.TV and back out to the TiVo. That worked just fine. There are two ethernet ports. I believe the second one is for passthrough of ethernet, but it is labeled only as Ethernet2, and I can’t find any documentation about it. There isn’t a product manual for the Simple.TV, not even in PDF form online. There’s a power port, and then there’s also a USB port for the external drive. That’s where I hit my first snag. Read more
