Anyone tried it? Opinions?

I just ordered a Simple.tv with lifetime subscription and a Roku2 bundled for $199. Will pair it with a 1 TB Western Digital HDD that I've got hanging around the house.

Review will be coming when I get a chance to play with it.

Review so far:

Well packaged and nicely made piece of hardware. Setup was reasonably straightforward for me, but was very short of documentation. I had to search around the internet and find the answers on forums for a couple of obvious questions like "can the external drive be used to store other data if you swap it over to your PC?" (it can't). Having to setup the Roku and then install the simple.tv channel adds a few steps to the process. It's ok for someone who's reasonably techie, but would be imposing for non-tech people. Also, the brand new WD Passport drive failed to detect when plugged in and had to be plugged into my Mac and repartitioned with a single FAT partition before it would work.

It's hard to give a good review because I haven't used it much yet. I had enough quality problems trying to stream the one or two live shows that I watched that it became too distracting to watch. Bad glitches are present in basic DVR functions like fast forward, pause and rewind. Changing channels takes a long time. Curiously, I'm watching another show right now and am not having any of the distracting artifacting that I was experiencing earlier. Looks like more research is in order. I'll record some NFL this weekend and see how it does.

Combine that with the fact that I didn't read the specs carefully enough and I didn't realize it wouldn't receive analog cable, only ClearQAM digital. With TimeWarner, that's like 5 channels. For me that makes it not worth anywhere close to $200.

Most of the problems I have so far are software issues, so perhaps as they work out the bugs, this may be a decent product, but for now, my opinion is that it's not quite ready for prime time. I'll probably try to sell it once I get bored with it.

Woot

Thanks. Now I feel even better about overpaying

The extra money might go toward development that will provide consumers with a better product. So, by paying retail you’re directly helping your fellow man get more enjoyment out of life, putting them in a better mood that will then eventually spread from person to person throughout all humanity. Thus making the entire world a better place, or not.

There are software improvements on the horizon, along with a new dual-tuner box (http://www.engadget.com/2013/09/05/simple-tv-second-gen-streaming-dvr/). I'm sure the new box on the horizon is why there are so many blowout deals on the old one.

Cool. I'll wait for the 2.0 software and see if I like it better.

Top current annoyances:

1. Any time I pause, rewind, ff, etc...it stops with a black screen and progress bar to buffer, then plays for a few seconds, then stops to buffer, then plays for a few seconds, then sometimes stops to buffer again. I understand buffering, but lets just get it out of the way all at once instead of stopping 2-3 times.

2. The screen turns black when you ff or rw, so there's no visual indication of where you are in the program, other than the time bar at the bottom. This is terribly annoying when you're trying to skip commercials.

3. AFAIK, you can't start playing a program while it's still recording, you must wait until it's complete.

4. Can't figure out how to browse a grid for upcoming programming on the Roku app. Also, the guide data only seems to load a couple days beyond the current day. I'm not sure exactly, but that's my impression as a light user.

Regarding #4 above, it appears that it's just the Roku app that absolutely sucks with regard to scheduling. The online interface is much better (but still not up to TiVo standards). That said, I don't want to pull out my laptop or iPad every time I want to schedule a recording, so they definitely need to spend some time beefing that up.

New annoyance:

Apparently you can only adjust the scheduling to record over by up to 4 minutes and it is done universally. There doesn't seem to be any way to adjust a subscription to a particular show to record 30 minutes over, like I want to do with NFL games.

Ouch. Honestly, that's enough to turn me off right there. I do that ALL the time. It's how I watch every [American] football game.