I have a Slingbox from years ago, but the problem is that it doesn’t support HDTV. And although we have some nice HDTVs in the house, I find that the family uses them far more than I do. I don’t watch much television — live sports mostly — but it’s becoming more difficult to find an unused screen in the house. Then again, I have plenty of smaller screens between my tablets, smartphones, Chromebook and 27-inch iMac. So I reached out to our resident cord-cutting expert, Janko Roettgers, and asked what might be the best solution to watch broadcast television on these devices.

Janko recommended the HDHomeRun, which he featured in a Cord Cutters episode last year. I was able to snag a new HDHomeRun for $85 on Amazon, which is far less than a new Slingbox. So what is it?

Essentially, the HDHomeRun is a small box, roughly the size of an Apple TV. You attach an antenna to it — I have a very small one that works fine — and connect the device to your home router. That’s it. Inside the HDHomeRun are two over-the-air tuners; both of which use the same antenna for a signal. The tuners pull in local broadcast digital television and then make the content available over your home network.

That works out well because I just upgraded my network router to take full advantage of our 75 Mbps home FiOS connection. I was getting around 15 Mbps wireless speeds with an old Apple AirPort Extreme, but now see 70 Mbps and up from the new Asus RT-AC66U router, which is future-proofed with 802.11ac support. These network speeds are easily capable of streaming HDTV around the house.

My original intent was to use the HDHomeRun to watch content on my iMac and it works flawlessly. I paired the included HDHomeRun tuner software with VLC to view television shows. There are better alternatives out there that I’ll look at in the future, but for now, this setup is fine. But after a day, I decided I didn’t want to be tied to my home office just to watch TV.

Mobile apps to the rescue!

After a little investigation, I found InstaTV in the iTunes App Store. I tried the free Lite version and it works as advertised. The software automatically recognized the HDHomeRun tuner, scanned for channels and in a few minutes, I was watching the local news on my iPad mini. The free version limits you to a low resolution, small window for content, so I upgraded to the full version for $9.99 which supports full-screen playback at native resolution.

Of course, I use multiple devices and platforms, so I set out to find something that would work with Android. Turns out I had great timing.

Earlier this week, a third-party app called HomeRun TV landed in the Google Play store. I found out about it by reading the HDHomeRun user forums and immediately bought it for $2.99. I figured if it didn’t work, I had 15 minutes to get a refund. There was no reason to be concerned however. After a configuration tweak and one additional download — I had to get VPlayer for the video output — I got the software working on my Galaxy Note 2 and caught the late-morning local news.

If you’re going to go this route with HomeRun TV on Android, note that there’s one setting to check. By default, the app is designed to watch television that’s streamed from a PC, likely because there are USB tuner sticks for Windows on the market. To get streaming to work on my Android phone, I had to modify this setting by telling the app to “Stream Video Directly to Device.” Prior to that, I was getting error messages.

While I opted for the HDHomeRun over a new Slingbox, there is an advantage to the more expensive, latter option. It’s fairly easy to get a Slingbox to provide access to content over mobile broadband while away from home. I don’t really need that option, but it’s worth a mention for those that do.

I’m also fairly certain there are a few software options that will let me use my iMac as a DVR for content from the HDHomeRun, so I’ll be looking into that as well. For now, I’m just glad that I can watch a football game on a Sunday afternoon on any of my devices while the 60- and 70-inch HDTVs in the house are in use. You can do the same on any iOS or Android device with this setup.

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Show notes for this episode:

• Elgato sells the HDHomeRun bundled with its EyeTV software, and the package retails for about $160.
• Don’t have a Mac? Then simply buy the device from Silicon Dust, which will cost you only $130.
• I kept running into issues with EyeTV not recognizing the HDHomeRun as soon as I changed my network configuration. Repeating the guided setup with the EyeTV Setup assistant finally did the trick.

Are you struggling with over-the-air TV reception? Or maybe you’ve found a different solution to this problem? Let us know in the comments, get in touch with us on Twitter (@cordcutters) or on Facebook, or email us at cordcutters @ gigaom.com.

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Google has long tried to align its TV platform with pay TV operators, emphasizing it’s complementary to and not a replacement of, cable. That belief was also part of the design of the Logitech Revue Google TV set-top box, which gets access to live TV by inserting itself into the HDMI chain between your cable box and your TV.

The Revue didn’t feature an ATSC tuner, which would have made it possible to watch free over-the-air HD TV. The Fishtank hardware, on the other hand, does seem to have such a tuner, as well as the antenna input to go along with it. This could mean that users of the device could get HD broadcast programming and augment it with Google TV content and apps without paying for a TV subscription.

The caveat to all of this, of course, is that this is just development hardware, which doesn’t necessarily reflect how the final products will look. Heck, for all we know, Logitech could be sticking with its current set-top box design for years to come.

However, there will also be new Google TV devices from other manufacturers, and the fact that Google has decided to add the antenna port to the developers box could reflect that the important of over-the-air TV for Google TV is growing — be it through ATSC tuners integrated in TV sets running the platform or through dedicated antenna ports on next-generation Google TV boxes.

A Google spokesperson said that the company wasn’t able to comment at this time on Fishtank.

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As part of its development of the National Broadband Plan, the FCC has started poking around TV broadcasters to find out how much spectrum they are using, and if any of it can be freed up for other commercial purposes. The Commission released a public notice (document) today asking questions such as:

1. What factors should the Commission consider when examining and comparing the benefits of spectrum used for over-the-air television broadcasting and those of spectrum used for wireless broadband services?

2. What would be the impact to the U.S. economy if insufficient additional spectrum were made available for wireless broadband deployment, in terms of investments, jobs, consumer welfare, innovation, and other indicators of global leadership?

3. What would be the impact to the U.S. economy and public welfare if the coverage of free over-the-air broadcast television was diminished to accommodate a repacking of stations to recover spectrum?

4. How do television broadcasters use the capabilities of digital television today? Please provide information on data rate allocations to HD, SD, multicast streams, bandwidth leasing arrangements, etc. and the business rationale behind these choices.

TV broadcasters currently have 6 Mhz of spectrum per station and experts say that they only use 1 – 2 Mhz to deliver HD channels today depending on the type of transmission standard use, they could use as little as 1 MHz per standard definition channel broadcasting using MPEG 4and as much as 5 MHz for an HD broadcasting using MPEG-2. That number could go up with the advent of 3-D TVs or some other kind of as-yet-invented video technology rolls out.

Right now the FCC is just in inquiry mode as it collects data. And it’s easy for the tech savvy to dismiss the importance of OTA TV given how we’re shifting to MSO-delivered and over-the-top TV, but there are still lots of people who rely on free, over-the-air transmissions. The Commission’s challenge will be in balancing the need for more wireless bandwidth (damn you, iPhone!) with the public interest in having free broadcast television.

For more, check out Stacey’s post on how The FCC Sees the Future — and it’s VoIP over at Gigaom.

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