Review: The AirTV 2 Broadcast TV DVR

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:

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:

Demo of AirTV on the Sling App