Ever since we launched Channels for Android TV and Fire TV last week, everyone's been asking "What about DVR?".
The bad news is, building a full-fledged DVR client is a lot of work and it's going to take us time to reimplement all the DVR features we spent the last year adding to Channels for Apple TV and iOS. The good news, however, is that we're not going to make you wait until the DVR features are 100% done.
DVR features for Android TV and Fire TV will be released in multiple phases. Each phase will go through a beta phase to ensure stability before releasing. When we're happy with the results, we'll release those features to the main public release. Then we'll move on to the next phase.
The first phase of the beta focuses on DVR consumption. This includes browsing and playback of your recordings. This means you can now watch your DVR recordings and even skip past commercials by double clicking the Right button on the remote.
You'll still have to use the web admin (or the tvOS or iOS version of Channels) to manage passes and recordings, but at least you can watch your recordings now.
The beta is available to all existing customers of Channels for Android TV. To upgrade to the beta, opt-in on the Play Store: https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.getchannels.app
You might be asking, what about Fire TV? The Amazon App Store leaves much to be desired with their beta process. Because of that, we won't be using that version in the beta. But when the features are released publicly, they will be available on the Fire TV version as well.