Turning the Tablo on TV broadcasters
Device works on free-to-air broadcasting
OTTAWA — A small Ottawa company has huge plans to forever upend the way people watch television.
Nuvyyo quietly launched a campaign on crowdfunding website Indiegogo on Friday, with the intention of raising $50,000 and getting a few of its new Tablo devices into the hands of average consumers.
Tablo is a small device that plugs into an over-the-air TV antenna and then, thanks to a slick software interface designed by Nuvyyo’s engineers, lets people pick and choose their favourite TV shows to tape. Residents of many Canadian cities receive signals of dozens of TV stations in high definition. The signals are beamed through the airwaves, all a person needs to receive them is a digital antenna.
Tablo works a lot like a TiVo, a smart Personal Digital Recorder, except it records free high definition over-the-air TV signals instead of cable or satellite channels. It needs an external hard drive as well as tablet computer or smartphone in order to record shows.
Nuvyyo, which is selling on Indiegogo for between $149 and $289 depending on the version, has been designed to push out any recorded content that it may have to tablets, including iPads, Apple TV devices or Google Chromecast devices and various other mobile devices. Basically, whatever a person records they can watch, wherever and whenever they like on pretty much every device they own.
“People in Ottawa get 14 stations. All of the major Canadi- an networks. If you are in the U.S. or close to the U.S. border you get all of the U.S. networks as well,” said Grant Hall, chief executive of Nuvyyo. “It’s an incredible amount of very high quality programming. For TV lovers, Tablo takes away the fear of ‘cord-cutting’ by perfecting the user experience with our tablet app and delivering the DVR functionality everyone knows and loves.”
The $50,000 the company is trying to raise will be used to pay for the first major production run of the company’s devices. Hall said the first buyers of the device, which is being manufactured by Ottawa-area company L-D Tool & Die, will help to shape the way the device will ultimately appear on store shelves. The Indiegogo effort is all about raising awareness of the device and getting it out to consumers. Should all go as planned the company may be able to attract the interest of a large retailer such as Best Buy or Walmart.
The first run of devices will come with a year’s worth of free programming data, after that Nuvyyo will have to charge a subscription fee for Tablo. The company hasn’t set the fee yet but expects it to be low. Nuvyyo pays for access to TV schedules, which it pushes out to Tablo so it can record TV programming. Hall said the company can’t provide those updates for free and remain profitable.
The eight-person firm is already well positioned to compete in the market with Tablo, — it received a $4-million round of financing from Kanata-based Celtic House Venture Partners earlier this year.
Tablo is yet another device on the market to help consumers move away from monthly cable and satellite subscriptions, a movement referred to as “cutting the cord.”
Services such as Netflix helped lead the charge by providing consumers with access to a wealth of TV and movie content that they can watch, commercial free, on demand for a low monthly fee. The service has been massively popular with Canadians. A study released by Media Technology Monitor in September said that as much as 25 per cent of English- speaking Canadian households subscribe to Netflix. That number has almost doubled over the past year. The company doesn’t release its Canadian subscriber count publicly.
The appeal of services such as YouTube and Netflix, combined with the ability to watch most of a broadcaster’s popular TV shows through their websites, is making it easier than ever for consumers to simply go without a monthly subscription.
According to a study released by researcher ComScore in July, as many as 16 per cent of Canadians now live without a cable or satellite subscription. The trend is most popular among younger Canadians who have grown up with the Internet and are comfortable with new technologies.