The AirTV 2 is a two-tuner broadcast TV tuner that connects to your home network by Wi-Fi or Ethernet. The addition of an external USB hard drive (not included) allows viewing of live TV or recorded shows on a website or on the Sling app for Roku, Fire TV, Android, iOS, and other platforms. The Air TV’s sister product, AirTV Anywhere has an internal 1TB drive.
AirTV works in conjunction with the Sling app, but you don’t need a paid Sling subscription to use it; you can sign in for free. Note that SLING TV L.L.C. and AirTV L.L.C. are wholly owned subsidiaries of DISH Network Corporation.
Although the AirTV 2 is a capable product, overall I recommend the Tablo Gen 4 for most people. If you want to be able to watch your recordings away from home, however, the AirTV 2 does that while the Tablo Gen 4 does not.
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Physical Design
The AirTV 2 is a small plastic box that stands vertically. The box includes a wall-wart power supply and quick start guide. As I mentioned, you need to supply a USB hard drive to do any recording.
The AirTV 2 box has ventilation holes near the bottom and at the top of the unit. I like this design because it allows cool air to flow in from the bottom and exit out the top.

Setup
If you’ve ever set up a Ring doorbell on Wi-Fi, the process is very similar to setting up the Air TV 2 on Wi-Fi. First, you need to install the Sling app on your phone and create a free account. Next, you’ll have to get onto the Air TV 2’s Wi-Fi network and enter your Wi-Fi network’s password (the app will guide you through this).


Or, you could set up the AirTV 2 using wired Ethernet, but I prefer Wi-Fi to avoid having to run long cables around my home, and to allow me to put it close to my antenna, not next to my router.
Set up went smoothly for me, except for when I entered the wrong Wi-Fi password. The app just hung. When I re-started it and entered the correct password, it worked fine.
After you do a channel scan, you’re ready to start watching live TV assuming you’ve connected an antenna.
One note, if you reset your AirTV, you’ll have to delete it from your app in order to restart the pairing process.
Tuner Quality
The AirTV’s tuner is excellent. My AirTV 2 picked up a whopping 169 channels in Los Angeles. More importantly, it was able to find VHF channel 13 and its sub-channels (where I watch Star Trek on Heroes and Icons), which my Tablo Dual Lite DVR wasn’t. So, that is a big win for AirTV! The tuner brings in more channels than the Tablo when connected to the exact same antenna in the exact same location!
UPDATE: Some months after writing this article, I re-tested the Tablo Dual Lite and the AirTV 2 tuners, and this time Tablo found more channels. It’s possible that Tablo’s firmware was updated to bring in more channels.
Watching Live TV
The Sling app offers some good free streaming content in addition to your broadcast TV channels. I found their free channels similar to Pluto TV’s. I was stoked to be able to watch The Walking Dead on one of these channels.
The channel guide is what you would expect with each row being a different channel and the columns being times. If you view all channels, the streaming channels are mixed in with your broadcast channels in the channel guide, making them hard to distinguish. Luckily, there is a “Locals” tab that allows you to see only your broadcast TV channels. The TV station’s logo is shown to identify the channel, which is great, but I wish it also displayed the actual channel number as well.


As with the other DVRs, it takes a long time (over 5-6 seconds) to switch from viewing one channel to another. With these devices, it’s best to just look at the channel guide to decide what to watch rather than to surf.
If you have a hard drive connected to your unit, you are able to pause live TV (contrary to what is said in some other reviews of AirTV; they’re probably using it without the hard drive).
Killer Feature: Watching When Away From Home
With the AirTV 2, you can watch your recordings and live TV when away from home using the Sling app! This is actually a pretty important feature now, since the Gen 4 Tablo can’t do it (some previous generation Tablos can do it though).
Picture Quality
When comparing the AirTV picture to the picture on my Samsung TV connected directly to an antenna, the AirTV picture seems more blurry with the artifacts (which I believe are in the original broadcast signal, not from the viewing device) more noticeable. Granted, this could be simply due to the Samsung doing more visual tricks like adjusting contrast.


Hard Drive Compatibility
To record, you need to attach a USB hard drive. That’s where I had my first problem. I’d been using a 160GB Maxtor USB hard drive with my Tablo Dual Lite for years with no problems. Unfortunately, when I connected this drive to the AirTV 2, it said the drive did not meet the minimum read and write speeds required.

Next, I tried using the 500GB Western Digital hard drive that I got from my Fire TV Recast, and that worked fine. Note that when plugging in new drives, you may get a message that no USB drive is attached; just let it sit connected. Sometimes it takes a while to recognize new drives.
The Air TV website DVR page provides a short list of drives that were verified to work with the Air TV, which are as follows at the time of writing:
- Western Digital My Passport
- Western Digital Easy Store
- Western Digital Elements
- Western Digital My Book
- Seagate Expansion
It seems that the AirTV 2 is fussier about drives than other DVRs are.
Also, the AirTV 2 will only use the first 2TB of drive space of your hard drive. In other words, if you plug in a 5GB drive, it will only use 2TB of it. Tablo will work with drives up to 8TB in size and will use all of that space.
Recording and Discovering New Content
Let’s talk about how to record shows. On AirTV, you go to the channel guide and hover over the round record button. If the show is a series, then you’ll have the option to that episode only, new episodes, or new episodes and reruns.
That’s fine and works as it should. But, the Tablo DVR has a killer feature where you can see a Netflix-style grid of all of the TV shows or movies coming in the next two weeks. This is invaluable for finding new shows or movies to record and it reminds me of browsing Blockbuster Video in the old days:

On AirTV, you have to scroll through the channel guide, or type in the name of the show you want to record in the search form. That works, but you’re probably not going to discover something new to record that way.
On the Sling app home page, there is a grid of recommended shows, but unfortunately, those are mostly from streaming services. There’s no way to see just the upcoming free broadcast TV content in this format.

As a side note, the Sling TV web app has an obvious Record button. On the Sling TV app for iOS, there is no “record” button available while you’re watching live TV. Instead, you need to go back to the channel guide, press and hold on the show in the guide, then select Recording Options -> This Episode only.
No Manual Recording
In the comments, reader Ron pointed out that the AirTV has no way to do manual recordings, i.e., to set a recording time like a VCR, as opposed to using the guide.
Most people would never do that, but he lives in a part of the country that is between TV markets, so the AirTV guide that comes up does not encompass all of the channels he is able to get. As a result, he can’t watch or record all of the channels that are available with the AirTV.
Fast Forwarding – Slow!
On AirTV 2, when I press the “30” button to skip ahead by 30 seconds, it takes about 4 seconds to respond. Not ideal for rapidly skipping commercials. This is actually kind of a big drawback.
Going backward is equally slow.
Internet Access Required to Watch TV
Unfortunately, you can’t even launch the Sling app when you have no Internet access. That means you can’t watch live TV or recorded shows on your AirTV when your Internet is down. This isn’t a big deal most of the time, but one of the cool things about broadcast TV is the ability to still watch TV when your Internet is down.
Reliability
In my testing, the AirTV was pretty solid. The main bug I encountered was that sometimes the sound would go out after selecting a new channel. This could be easily fixed by closing the channel and selecting it again.
Summary
Here’s a summary of all of the aspects that I compared between the AirTV and Tablo Generation 4:
Feature | AirTV | Tablo Generation 4 |
Physical Design | Stands vertically (may result in better airflow) | Horizontal |
Network Connectivity | Ethernet and Wi-Fi | Ethernet and Wi-Fi |
Ease of Setup | Good | Good |
Internal Storage | Available with or without internal storage | Has some internal storage but can add more. |
Number of Tuners | 2 | 2 |
Tuner Quality | Good | Good |
Watching on Multiple TVs | Sling app is available on many devices. | App support for Generation 4 is limited but more apps are coming. |
Watching Live TV and Recordings Away from Home | Yes! | Nope |
Picture Quality | Good | Good; Can get non-transcoded video when using external storage for even better picture quality. |
Hard Drive Compatibility | Wouldn’t work with a Maxtor USB drive that worked with Tablo. | Good. Works with a lot of drives. |
Max Hard Drive Storage | 2TB | 8TB |
Recording and Discovering New Content | The Sling app shows paid content mixed with broadcast content, making it hard to find free stuff to record. | Tablo’s Netflix-style grid lets you see all broadcast TV shows and movies coming in the next two weeks. |
Automatic Commercial Skip | No | Had it before on Premium Service but discontinued now |
Watching Recorded TV | Skipping ahead is slow. | Skipping ahead past commercials is much more responsive. |
Manual Recording | Nope. | Generation 3 Tablo had this, Generation 4 doesn’t. |
Requires Internet to Watch | Yes | Yes. With the old Tablo, you could watch live and recorded TV even without Internet. |
Reliability | I’ve encountered some bugs while navigating. | There are some software bugs. |
Channel Guide Cost | Free. | Free. |
Countries It Works In | U.S. | Gen 4 only works in the United States. Older Tablos would work in Canada as well. |
AirTV Pros
- No fees for the channel guide!
- Great tuner (brings in the most channels).
- Has Wi-Fi.
- Can watch live TV and recordings away from home.
- Easy to set up and use.
Air TV Cons
- Paid streaming services are mixed in with upcoming broadcast TV shows in the user interface, making it harder to find free content.
- Doesn’t work with all USB drives (or any SSDs). Might need to purchase a recommended USB drive rather than use one you already have.
- Only uses the first 2TB of drive space.
- Can only set up recordings through the guide. No manual recording setup.
- Skipping ahead (fast forwarding) is cumbersome.
- There is no customer service number listed on their website (as of September 10, 2023) that you can call if you need help.
- App won’t work without Internet access.
- Only works in the United States.
Conclusion
For most people, I would recommend Tablo Gen 4 over AirTV 2 due to the superior user interface, better drive compatibility, and better customer service. However, if you want to be able to view live TV and your recordings away from home, then AirTV is a good choice.
What do you think of your AirTV? Any questions? Please leave a comment below. For a walkthrough of using the AirTV on the Sling app, check out my demo of the user interface on YouTube:
MyAirTv2 doesn’t seem to support OTA recording anymore. It did for a while and it is listed as a compatible hard drive. I’ve reset up several times , reformatted the hard drive and I get an error message saying it’s not present. I’ve been trying to resolve this for months and you must know the problem getting tech help. Any ideas? Repeated setting this thing up from scratch is sending my nerves over the edge. As far as recommending this device; I can’t do it. As for quality, I’m on my second AirTv2 I had to return it and get a replacement. The first one wouldn’t set up at all, Wi-Fi or Ethernet.
Hi Myles,
I’ve had the same hard drive problem with the AirTV 2, but there is a solution! Please see this article:
https://www.disablemycable.com/blog/airtv-no-hard-drive-connected/
Best,
Brian
Hi Myles,
Are you able to watch streaming channels on the device? That would determine if it is indeed connected.
Perhaps try going through the Wi-Fi setup process again, and/or trying Ethernet just as an experiment…
Let me know what you find out…
Best,
Brian
——————
Hi Brian,
Thank you for responding so promptly. I was able after a couple of tries with your directions, to have my hard drive recognized.
But now I get a message when I click “record”,( 16-476) “We’re sorry! Temporarily unable to record the program. Please check internet and try again” I have high speed internet with download speeds ranging from 600- 800 mps.
I don’t understand why there are so many problems with the AirTv2.
Thanks,
Myles
Check out this thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AirTV/comments/y2g50o/error_16476_when_trying_to_record/
Perhaps try doing a channel scan?
Brian
Why are you confusing people with air TV 2 (the previous generation product) no matter what version Air TV you have you can easily separate over the air content in the guide. Simply air TV the newest and best VERSION includes the hard drive it’s all there plus 4 tuners not just 2. It’s been around for a couple years now why are you wasting people’s time on an old product. Also if you choose to be a real expert you might find at the top of the guide screen you can choose over the air tv to only see over the air (OTA) channels you don’t have to get confused with any of the other free content from sling free. They’re actually three different versions of this there’s the first generation which had two tuners and no storage unless you attach something then there’s the second one which is just like the first one for the most part but it stands up you show that one and talk about that one. Then there’s the current third generation that you’re not talking about which has been out for a couple years now it has 4 tuners hard drive everything you need and guess what in the channel guide you can select locals only. There I repeated it twice for you in case you missed that when you were doing your research. Really I’m a TiVo guy but I couldn’t read through your whole article after reading the first part about Air TV that was so badly researched. You are doing article you might want to make sure you inform people of what’s really available.
Hi Aaron,
I chose to review the AirTV2 because I didn’t want internal storage. I did mention the sister product, the AirTV with internal drive.
The Sling TV interface does provide a channel guide with current OTA Channels, but what I was talking about is a grid showing the next two weeks of movies or TV shows, like Tablo has.
Best,
Brian
I am looking for a dvr that hooks to antenna ota and not use wifi .I have very little wifi. Not wanting to use internet. Do they make dvr like that. Don’t care about price
Hi Bruce,
Check out this option which doesn’t require Wi-Fi or Internet:
https://www.disablemycable.com/blog/mediasonic-homeworx-digital-converter-box/
Best,
Brian
Tried setting up air TV with sling app but would not connect. Sling app had no setup instructions and air TV website was a 404 not found. Total waste of time. Returned to Amazon for refund. My best TV tuner is in my PC, using Windows Media Center, using 4 Tb HDD. Microsoft dropped WMC when they forced users to Windows 10. I think greater powers in the streaming industry forced them to drop WMC so they could charge for free TV content. Fortunately, EPG123 program tied with Schedules Direct to give absolute powerful performance to those customers still running Windows 7 (a great and stable OS). And, the video files are open spec, not like Air TV and Tablo and others who use proprietary file specs for DVR recordings, like DISH, Direct TV, and others, preventing you from opening them using standard PC video file specs.
Hi Steven,
Yeah, I heard that Sling was recovering from a hack so some of their sites were down. It is back up and working now.
Best,
Brian
I checked Air TV.net just now and it’s still down.
You’re right, but that is just an informational page. I can still watch live broadcast TV from my AirTV on https://watch.sling.com/.
But, it’s still not great that their main info site is down, I agree!
Best,
Brian
I appreciate your reply. But the link published in the Air TV manual does not work and my Android Sling app does not contain a setup selection in their menu like the Air TV manual states. I only purchased it for a friend who needs this remote antenna-WiFi setup based on recommendations from experts and the manufacturer’s advertisement and it did not work. I am a staunch advocate for OTA cord cutting and very familiar with Wi-Fi connections but the manufacturer has poor tech support.
I have no subscription & my Tablo (4 Tuners) has had zero problems. I can set recordings just like a VCR start time, Channel, duration. I don’t miss recordings due to program guide errors or changes…if a news channel replaces a regular scheduled show with a special – it gets recorded. My AirTv scan finds 51 channels but stations not in the Sling Guide are not watchable since you Must use their guide to watch a program so I can watch about half. The AirTV gets 18 PBS channels from 4 transmitters 2 from my state and 2 weaker from the state next door- the guide won’t let me watch the 2 from my state. It also gets 2 low power local stations for 10 channels I can’t watch because they aren’t in the guide- but if I factory reset the device and give it a zip code 700 miles away in a different time zone I can spoof it into watching local news by clicking on Law & Order in the guide and it will tune to the local news…it takes 45 minutes to change back to my actual zip code. Plus it often says a station’s signal is too weak, when I’m 2 miles from the tower sending out a megawatt feed. AirTV is a total waste of money & customer service is worthless – I am a broadcast engineer and the Air TV makes a giant paper weight – but useless for much else
Hi Ron,
Thanks for sharing. Very interesting points.
Best,
Brian
Hi Ron,
I’ve incorporated your comments in my article as a warning for those who live in-between TV markets. Many thanks!
Best,
Brian