Aereo Online Broadcast TV Goes Live in Houston & Miami

[TallGuyJohninBKK]

For folks here who keep their U.S. residence addresses in Texas or Florida, you may be interested to know that the Aereo online broadcast TV service has just recently launched in Houston, TX and Miami, FL, and will be coming soon to Dallas, Austin and Tampa.

What does that mean? For those with a resident address in those areas, a matching credit card billing address there and the matching VPN service-IP address, you'll be able to watch U.S. broadcast television channels online via PC, Mac or Ipad/IPhone device for $8 a month plus tax, including 20 hours of online DVR capacity. Adobe Flash 11+ is required for their player. No Android compatibility yet, but supposedly they're working on it.

I signed up for Aereo's one month free-trial for one of their new cities, and have been actively using it the past few days, and I must say, I'm impressed. The available channels vary by market area/city, but they're generally the same channels you'd get in that area via digital broadcast television -- the major over-the-air networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, CW, Fox, PBS, Bloomberg), some classic and specialty TV channels, ethnic Spanish/Vietnamese/Chinese language, etc etc.

But the best part, I've found, is the included online DVR service that includes 20 rolling/stored hours of content recording. Or, for $12 per month, you can get 60 hours of DVR capacity and the ability to record two shows at once. So, for example, let's say a program you like is on broadcast TV in TX or FL at an inconvenient time for you. You can simply go into the Aereo online program guide, select the show, choose what kind of recording you want (all episodes, only new episodes, and how many episodes you want to store in your online DVR), and everything else from there on is automatic.

So, as an example, I went into the Aereo program guide and pre-selected a bunch of shows I like but mostly never get around to seeing here -- the Nightly News, Washington Week in Review on PBS, NFL Football games on the broadcast networks, a few current network primetime series, and a lot of older classic network shows like M*AS*H that are on a couple of the available "oldies" networks -- and now all of them will record automatically per my specifications. There's even a setting that allows the user to choose which show gets priority over another if there's a conflict in recording times, since you can only record one actual program/show at any given time.

The one segment missing from Aereo, of course, are the major cable channels -- ESPN, CNN, TNT, TBS, etc etc.... None of those are present, because the cable industry and networks are keeping a strangle hold on them. If those are one's interest, though, another provider called USTVNow does offer an online, streaming cable TV package with all those cable channels plus the main over-the-air channels that costs $29 a month or $39 a month with online DVR. So the monthly pricing difference is substantial.

The streaming video quality I received via my cable internet package was just fine, and the service has user-selectable video settings (low, med, hi, auto) that allow you to control how much bandwidth is involved. With the Aereo service, you can either watch the available channels/content live as its being broadcast, or choose to record any program into your online DVR, which then creates a list of recorded programs you can watch anytime at your leisure.

In Aereo's online channel guide, you also have the ability to "hide" any particular channels you're not interested in, so I hid a bunch of them on my account. For my city, the local newspaper said Aereo was offering 44 different broadcast channels via their service. But for me, after doing some pruning based on my interests, I ended up with 16 general broadcast channels and then another 12 ethnic channels I kept just for passing interest.

Here's an example of what their channel guide looks like (I didn't screen cap the portion that shows the city-specific network channels):

And here's a screen capture of what their browser web video player looks like (without using the full-screen option):

There are some caveats involved: as mentioned above, you have to have your credit card billing address in an area Aereo serves, and their system checks with every log-in for IP geolocation, so your IP address location has to likewise be within that same service area. Their accounts also support up to 5 "devices" per account, but each different browser use (MSIE, Firefox, Chrome) counts as a different device even on the same computer, as do different computers, etc etc. But you can add and delete devices as you choose, keeping within the 5 device limit.

The only negative I found with the Aereo service was their structuring of their online programming guide, which makes it difficult to easily see a range of hours of programming, such as if you wanted to see all of the primetime period hours on one screen, and also the actual hour ranges/times within a day. But it's very easy in their guide to see all of what's playing now for each channel and in the next hour or two, and also to search for any program by show title/name. But to improve on Aereo's guide, I went to the online TV listings service Zap2It and set up a matching channels profile for my Aereo service, and it's much easier there to navigate for the broader 5-6 hour span views.

FWIW, here's the Consumer Reports review of Aereo.

And right now on the Aereo website, they're offering a one-month free trial if you're located in an eligible area based on computer IP. For $8+tax a month, it seems to be a pretty good deal for anyone interested in broadcast television and/or convenient DVR capability -- provided you have an address in one of the cities Aereo serves.

Edited September 18, 2013 by TallGuyJohninBKK

[TallGuyJohninBKK]

Two other tidbits...

1. I should have mentioned, of course, the Aereo service now is available to anyone with combined residence and IP addresses in the other cities listed on the Aereo map, and cities planned for future expansion as indicated. But for readers here who keep U.S. residence addresses, there are various reasons that make Texas and Florida as more likely situations, so that's why I highlighted those.

2. One other nice feature of Aereo's web player. While it doesn't have any automatic commercial skipping function, it does have a built-in 30-second forward "skip" button that can be used to manually advance the player in those increments.

Edited September 18, 2013 by TallGuyJohninBKK

[TallGuyJohninBKK]

As of Jan 2014, Aereo is now available to those with credit card billing addresses and internet IP addresses in the following regions:

New York, Boston, Baltimore, Detroit, Atlanta, Salt Lake City, Denver, Miami, Houston and Dallas. And launching this coming week in Cincinnati.

Also, earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the legal dispute between Aereo and most of the major television networks, after Aereo had been winning most of the challenges brought by the networks in the lower courts.

http://blog.aereo.com/

Meanwhile, it just so happens that HMA VPN has server locations in the following cities among others:

Atlanta, Baltimore, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Miami, New York and Salt Lake City.