What happens when the company folds? I assume no guide service and no everywhere viewing but will it become a paperweight?
Yeah, I am constantly underwhelmed by Woot’s offerings anymore, and that is sad. If only the original creator of Woot would start his own TRUE one deal a day site with amazing prices, that might give me hope. Even if the deal items offered might sometimes be Mediocre, or might sell out too fast, hypothetically of course. Sorry, I guess I’m just feeling MEH.
All I can say is STAY AWAY. I bought one of these units last year. It was replaced once and I still have nothing but trouble. Check their forums, plenty of unhappy posts. Basically the unit locks up at least once a week, so unless you’re checking it every hour it will likely miss recording shows for you.
Support is horrible, slow to respond, frequently tell you to just unplug and replug the unit (which fixes the issue for a few hours until it happens again). Getting my first RMA was a pain. One engineer started contacting me privately from his personal gmail account troubleshooting my issues and giving me conflicting information from the official support. When I asked official support what was going on it caused a huge mess.
I have one of the single tuner (white) units. It has worked flawlessly for 3 years. But this dual tuner unit is complete junk.
I would NOT recommend this two tuner unit to anyone.
For those of us that already have lifetime service thanks to a previous Simple.TV Woot purchase, this is a difference without distinction. Nevermind that these are soon to be $99 bricks if the above-mentioned service meltdown is any indication.
In other words, this isn’t a deal.
$99 is the current defacto full-retail price of this device. Whatever nonsense “list price” Woot or Amazon displays is an anchoring trick to make you think you’re getting a bargain.
The included “lifetime” service is limited by the lifetime of Simple.TV which may be only hours at this rate.
A point of reference about just how loud the fan is. In my home office I have a full tower PC with several fans and HD’s, an external 8-bay hard drive enclosure with 2 substantial fans, and this Simple.TV 2. The Simple.TV is the loudest item of the lot. If I have a guest stay the night, the Simple.TV is the item I unplug so they can sleep in that room.
The only reason I really use this is so that I can get live TV in every room that has a roku without messing with coax, and so that I can watch shows a day before they show up on hulu. It barely accomplishes that goal.
If you try watching a live show 10 minutes into it and skip commercials, you’ll be starting and restarting the video through the whole show.
The service disruption last week shows just how inept the people running this thing are. I understand an upgrade failure. I could understand losing a day’s worth of data. But how the hell do you justify even trying an upgrade when the only backup you have is 6 months old??
The forums are full of people giving up and getting rid of the units. This would be terrible time to jump into this product.
Thanks once again for all your comments.
Unfortunately we did experience a significant technical issue during a major system update we performed a week ago. We deeply apologize for this and a have been working 24/7 make sure all of our customer accounts have been reinstated and their SimpleTV service is performing to their expectations.
New SimpleTV purchases made are NOT affected by last weeks event. Please enjoy your new SimpleTV DVR and take your TV anywhere!
I just got mine set up from the most recent Woot. The installation was honestly very easy, just took a few minutes. Unfortunately it only gets 19 channels when my count is 60 when my antenna is plugged directly in to the TV.
Has anyone ever used this with a wireless bridge?
For some reason I thought this unit had wi-fi support, but it does not. I figure if I put the unit in my shed I can put the antenna up high and take advantage of the thin walls.
Also, I have a coaxial signal amplifier left over from when I had a poor cable connection. Is there any reason that wouldn’t work with my Simple.TV?
NO DLNA streaming. Deal killer for most smart tv owners. (who don’t own roku’s)
Is the SimpleTV in the same location as your TV when you scan and only receive 19 channels? Signal strength can vary significantly when using an indoor antenna around the home. You may want to try launching your Chrome browser, sign in, then go to Settings, click on Guide where you can see all available channels. You may only have 19 selected out of potentially many more. Also try a rescan of the channels.
Regarding the wireless bridge, some customers use them with success. Not sure about the coax amp…sorry.
In theory this device is awesome…but if you ever need support from the company you can forget it. I ended trying for months to get support on a defective device and ended up having to file a complaint with the BBB to get any help from them. For what it’s worth, I’d pass on this deal.
If you value your sanity, stay very very far away from this thing.
We purchased our Simple.TV in August of 2014, and it was useful for about 4 months. As a cord cutter, this was the primary method for us to watch TV- mostly just the local news channels in the morning. By November, the cooling fan started to rattle and it gradually became louder and louder until December when the device would reboot constantly. We contacted support, and three days later were told that another unit was being shipped to us.
A week after that, the new Simple arrived, but when we hooked it up,the replacement unit went offline and started the boot-loop fun that the original unit was replaced for. Support was once again contacted, and 5 short days later, they replied that the unit appeared offline- of course it’s offline, it wont boot. Emailed them back and probably wont hear back for another week or so. I contacted Woot.com regerding this, and they pointed me to Silicon Dust.
Silicon Dust said that they dont support it and forwarded us back to simple.tv
I’m tempted to look up the SEC filing of the company and calling whatever number they have listed in public documents.
Gotta love the cloud.
I had the same conversation with a client who is putting up a website where they don’t really have the pages available locally at all.
Some folks haven’t be around long enough as adults to recall all the “real soon now” start-ups that died.
Anyone got a Floptical disk drive I can borrow?
Well when it worked it wasn’t bad.
But after last week’s fiasco resulting in having to reconfigure everything and then finding out that almost all of the saved programs had been wiped this thing goes very quickly to the trash can.
Also, my wife is leaving me because my stupid gadget lost Downton Abbey and I am to blame for not having an ordinary TV setup.
If there is any support from simpleTV, I will let you know. I sent them a request for support several days ago and all I have so far is the automated response.
BUYER BEWARE!
I use one hooked to a computer with windows media center. I capture all the antenna stuff I want to see. That’s all I ask of it and I love it but for one issue: using both tuners. I had to deactivate one tuner because anytime it used both, the programs were garbled and lagged = totally unwatchable. There is no tech support, so what is wrong do you think? My RAM and processor are within spec.
Amazon does NOT include lifetime subscription. $150 difference.
The reason for the difference is that the DVR has two tuners. There is a splitter in the box which feeds the tuners. That causes a drop in signal. Go to Radioshack and get an amp with an attenuator, place it just upstream of the DVR, and adjust until you get the expected channels.
Be careful using cable splitters and amps with OTA. Make sure they support the uhf channels you are trying to watch. A lot of older cable components did not.
Good luck!
I have submitted a problem report to RSS. No response so far. Ditto on the twitter account. If you would like to explain what the major update was or why you had to revert to a nine month old backup or what your plans are going forward, I’m all ears. Of my seven Simple DVRs, only three are powered up at this time. Is that going to make it difficult for you to restore my files? I reset one of my STV2s and formatted it’s disk. Is there a chance your restore activities will impact that DVR?
Hi, I’m very interested in this subject. I have the original Simple TV (white) with a single tuner. Like this user, multiple TV’s have picked up many more channels with the indoor antenna in the exact same location. This, along with forum posts from other users, leads me to believe the tuner isn’t very good on these units. Hoping SiliconDust partnership would improve this, I see the same kinds of reviews about the second gen.
1.) Can anyone comment if the tuners on this second gen are better.
2.) What if I just use one tuner, will the splitter still cause degredation?
3.) Will the attenuator help improve my STV1? I’d assume so.
Thanks!!
Hey Woot, How about a $59 deal for SimpleTV 2 for those who already have a subscription?