3 ms·

Aereo is for people who can't put up an antenna (or don't want to). This device requires an antenna.

• selmnoo 12y ago
  You must have at least one friend or family member who can put up an antenna though, right? Give it to them, and get a streamcast going! Sure it's five minutes of hassle setting the thing up, but once it's setup it's all free.
  • bri3d 12y ago
    My experience with doing this with friends is that most US ISPs have awful upload jitter, plus (increasingly) data caps as well. This might work for lucky fiber-to-home subscribers but every time I've tried on Comcast, a giant buffer (10 seconds or more) is required to hide the jitter, and sometimes the neighbors start seeding something on BitTorrent and the stream will still cut out. Plus there are a lot of contingencies that require an increasingly complex technical solution. First you have to deal with whatever router configuration / NAT is present. And sometimes your friend's IP changes, and you're stuck setting up dynamic DNS or a reverse proxy. The Broadway box was generally panned in reviews for not including a workaround for these networking issues, and I suspect the technical complexity of friend-to-friend streaming is why TV broadcasters have never been worried about it in the past. IPv6 will hopefully help solve the addressing and NAT issues, but the generally awful quality of US home connections remains a big problem.
  • superuser2 12y ago
    Upload speed on US cable internet is often around 56k, even where download speeds exceed 20Mbps.