Update December 9, 2020: Bad news! The HDHomeRun Prime 6 has been canceled.
We’ve already written about SiliconDust’s two new products, the HDHomeRun Servio and HDHomeRun Scribe Duo, but we had a few other questions for the company when we sat down with them at CES.
The biggest question we keep hearing from you is: what is the HDHomeRun Prime 6 release date? This question gets more important day by day, because the current three-tuner model is officially discontinued. They don’t have any more in stock, and they can’t produce any more units. You’re also anxious for it because they announced last year that it would be released in 2018. There are three main reasons they weren’t able to release it last year. The first was their focus on releasing the HDHomeRun Premium TV service. The other two reasons are the two new products we wrote about earlier.
Given all of that, SiliconDust is confident that they will release the HDHomeRun Prime 6, their six-tuner CableCARD tuner, in 2019. While we’d all like a more specific date, there’s a lot more that goes into releasing a CableCARD tuner than these other products. The piece that can take the most time is certification from CableLabs, and unfortunately, they haven’t gone through this yet. I’m sure this ambiguous timeline is frustrating for those who have been eagerly anticipating the tuner, but we were left confident that assuming no other unforeseen circumstances arise that they will be able to deliver this year.
The other thing that many HDHomeRun users have been asking about is the situation with HDHomeRun Premium TV. When they initially launched last year, they offered 45 premium television stations to be streamed for $35/month. Unfortunately, near the end of the year they were required to remove eight of those channels. SiliconDust is just white labeling the service from another provider. It is that third-party provider who is in negotiations to lock down those missing channels. So while SiliconDust wants a quick solution, all they can do is continue to pester their provider.
We don’t know when we’ll see a long-term solution to the missing channels, but SiliconDust has taken steps to keep customers happy while still providing value. First, they removed the eight channels from their web site entirely. That way new customers won’t be expecting something they can’t actually get. The other step they’ve taken is to reduce the price of the service by $10/month. That brings it down to about $25/month for 37 channels of premium television channels, and that’s still a pretty good deal if they have the channels you’re looking for. Just keep in mind that you’ll need at least one HDHomeRun tuner on your network to use HDHomeRun Premium TV.
We’ll of course be keeping an eye on the situation, and we’ll let you know as soon as we hear anything about the HDHomeRun Prime 6 release date, or a resolution to the missing channel situation with HDHomeRun Premium TV.
Keep an eye on The Digital Media Zone for all of our CES 2019 coverage.
