I am putting this in the FireTV camp, but its not exactly that...
I know of an Amazon skill called "Stream Player" that lets you watch some channels streaming on your Amazon Show device. It was great, but they they messed around with the available channels... and that had me thinking...
Can my HD Homerun and Channels run as a Skill on the Alexa Show? Holy Cow would that be unbelievable.
So that's what I'm asking... You guys would be my hero... or at least super cool.
Thanks.
-Scott
You could use a browser to load the DVR web UI and watch TV or recordings from there.
Can you use the DVR web UI if you don't subscribe to the DVR? (we don't record anything anymore)
This could be a valuable add-on. My wife loves using Channels on the Apple TV. But we are also fans of the New 10" Echo Show which we have a few. She had me add Live TV to our Hulu On Demand Subscription just for this purpose. Hulu has native skill. We can just say "Alexa watch ABC" (or any of the channels we have) and it will use Hulu to watch live tv via Hulu. Works extremely well. Now a 10" screen may not be that great for some but it is pretty cool in the Bathroom while she is getting ready and in the kitchen while cooking. Not sure how hard to add the native skill but just giving some user feedback. Would not be worth it to her to use the browser interface.
The device cannot play mpeg2 so there's no way to watch HDHR streams on it directly without a DVR server to transcode it first.
I have not followed closely but I thought at one point you were going to allow playback via the DVR so that you could use the native video players on various clients. With that you could start to offer many more features that are being requested. Maybe only supported on powerful servers? I think you do this for Remote Access but I found I did not really have a need for Remote Access so not sure.
I decided to give this a go using the WEB UI. Using the On Now tab make it pretty easy to select a Channel. And the streaming worked well. Even though not hard to use it was a problem if your Echo Show is not within arm's reach. Our usage of Echo Show for this is not nearly as easy as using voice commands with Hulu Live. We will continue to subscribe to Hulu Live strictly for this feature until some other streaming service (that I have) provides it.
@tmm1. I am sure you are very busy at this time. But when you are done with your various projects I recommend you consider a "light" client using the web UI connections (no user UI needed since all voice) because my guess is there are a lot of Echo Shows out there and growing. Hulu Live and Stream Player (have not tested) are the only two "live" streaming. I may need to test Stream Player but the voice commands are not at easy as Hulu Live and it uses Station web sites to pull the streams.
Now with TVE and LOCAST maybe time to review again. Hulu Live TV is already on the Show. I use it on multiple daily. Have been hoping more streaming options would be coming soon.
This announced today:
The other day SLING is coming to the Google Home Version of the Show.
Did you do any progress around this idea? Echo Show looks like a perfect device for Channels. I use it through Silk, go to On Now, select channel, then Watch, then go full screen, and video stream perfectly. But it would be awesome to have a skill for "Alexa, play CNN in Channels".
This assumes you have the DVR, right? I'm just HD Homerun/ Cable card/ Channels on ATP. No way to have channels on my show that I know of.
Correct. You need the DVR server.
Which Echo Show do you have? I have the 10 inch (2nd Generation) and neither Silk or Firefox will display anything. I'm just getting a spinning circle. I try to access by going to my.channelsdvr.net