SiliconDust To Update Products and Expand Apps

Update January 12, 2015: We incorrectly stated the tuner count on two of the devices that SiliconDust will be releasing this year. The forthcoming DVB-T2 device will have 2 tuners. The DVB-S device will have 8 tuners. 

Today we met with SiliconDust, maker of the much-loved HDHomeRun TV tuners. They weren’t actually showing off new products, but they did discuss their product roadmap with us. While they were hesitant to give dates on anything, there was a lot of good news.

SiliconDust has spent the last year expanding its reach into Europe markets. They’ll continue that into 2015 as they will be launching a 4-tuner 2-tuner DVB-T2 device for over-the-air customers. For free satellite customers you’ll soon be able to purchase an 8-tuner DVB-S tuner. And on the cable front, users of DVB-C can expect an 8-tuner device later in the year.

In the US we will soon see the 3-tuner HDHomeRun Prime, their CableCARD tuner, replaced with a 6-tuner version. That’s great news on its own, but even better is that they are still going to attempt to keep the price point under $150. Again, SiliconDust wasn’t providing any dates on anything, but we’re guessing this will happen in the second half of the year.

On the app front SiliconDust’s Android app continues to do well, and they have an iOS app in beta. They are already on Amazon Fire TV, but they told us that the Fire TV Stick doesn’t support MPEG-2 video. That means that the Stick would only support the versions of the HDHomeRun that have built-in transcoding.

For Microsoft fans, they told us that Windows Media Center users are still their biggest base of users. Perhaps more importantly though, when we asked them about Xbox One support they provided us with a very intriguing answer. They have an Xbox One development kit, so they are obviously having conversations with Microsoft about bringing support to the game console. We weren’t provided with any details about development, or how those discussions were going with Microsoft, but it sounds as if Microsoft also tends to dictate the timeline for the release of apps on Xbox. So even if SiliconDust has completed the app, they could face a significant delay before it’s even made available.

While we couldn’t pin SiliconDust down on any dates, it does sound like 2015 could be a very interesting year for the company. By the next CES we’ll have a 6-tuner CableCARD tuner at an aggressive price, along with OTA, cable, and satellite offerings across North America and Europe. If they manage to turn our Xbox Ones into DVRs that could very well be one of the biggest stories of the year for this community. As always, we’ll be following SiliconDust closely, so keep your eye on the DMZ for all of their upcoming announcements.