Just when you thought the virtual MVPD market had reached its threshold for new services, along comes another way to get live cable channels without the need for traditional pay TV.
Silicon Dust’s HDHomerun DVR products announced a new Premium TV service that charges $35 per month for live access to many of the top cable channels including ESPN, HGTV, TBS, AMC, Nickelodeon, Fox News and CNN. In all, the package includes 45 cable channels from 21st Century Fox, Disney, NBCUniversal, Discovery, Viacom, AMC Networks and Turner.
It’s a significant offering since it manages to include NBC, Fox and Disney-owned cable channels like USA Network, National Geographic and Disney Channel without including the big raft of regional sports networks owned by those broadcasters.
The new Premium TV service is intended to work alongside HDHomerun’s OTA channel products so that local and national broadcast networks are wrapped in. The service works across Android, iOS, macOS and Windows 10 devices along with Apple TV, Android TV and Amazon Fire TV.
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At $35 per month, HDHomerun’s service is priced competitively with similar streaming TV services like DirecTV Now and YouTube TV. But, as Gizmodo points out, the price for entry is more expensive.
To take full advantage of the service, consumers will need an HDHomerun device that can receive OTA channels and they will also need a network assisted storage device.
Silicon Dust says in its FAQ section that its HDHomerun Prime devices will not support the new Premium TV service because those devices are “CableLabs certified and major changes can cause big problems for certification and may require re-certification. As such, at this time we do not plan on adding Premium TV support.”
HDHomerun Premium TV is currently available in the U.S. and will soon be available in Canada.