I think we are finally going to the ‘cut the cord’ here regarding TV Service, leaving normal DirecTV and moving to an online service.
As I work to make a decision, I was wondering if there are any options currently in controlling any of the online service options?
I also have been reading there is now also a 4th YouTube TV option available as well.
Based on the reading and reviews out there, I’m currently leaning towards the PS Vue service. However I will need FireStick to use it since Samsung Tizen OS is still lagging with these options in there ‘store’.
I don’t know of any HA related options to control any of the services but we cut the cord a while back and I have tried sling, Vue and directvnow. Vue was the winner with sling in second place and directvnow last. Dtvnow has allot more channels than Vue but when any of them only work half the time and buffer the other half it’s painful.
Also would recommend the firetv or better yet an Nvidia shield as the Vue interface on a firestick will be pretty slow. I am slowly replacing my firetvs with Nvidia shields as the ads integrated into the firetv GUI drive me insane.
The roku stick and their higher end boxes work great with psvue. I hear they’re updating their roku app soon so it should be nicer in the future, but it’s pretty rock solid how it is now. The channel lineup seems better than competitors for the price.
One comment regarding that article is that the writer says it’s difficult to record things on psvue due to not being able to follow a team, like on youtube. I’ll agree that you can’t follow a team. However, to record something you just add the “show” to your favorites. For example to record all NFL games you just favorite the “NFL show” listed when you see a NFL game on. Then every NFL game is recorded. You don’t need to be there when the game starts to hit record, as they mentioned. Maybe that’s confusing to someone just starting to use it. And I agree it’s not as straightforward as setting a team to record. Anyways, just wanted to clarify that.
So I may look into the Nvidia Shield for use the PS Vue. But I may try a rooted Ouya first. I already have one of those here in the home running Kodi. So sign up for their trial soon and give it a go.
Need to make sure things meet the WAF. Controlling a TV via a game controller may be an WAF issue.
Works good… since there is no public API for it or anything you cannot just directly control it with home assistant. I can however launch the app with python scripts and the fire tv python/media player component https://github.com/happyleavesaoc/python-firetv
So I can launch the vue app, and I could write scripts to navigate to one of my favorite channels but that’s too much work and not worth it to me, id rather just pick up my controller.