Hauppauge Broadway

After seven years and a hodgepodge of various "almost" products, Sling Media's Slingbox Solo ($179.99, 4 stars) finally has a direct competitor?albeit not a particularly effective one. The Hauppauge Broadway ($199) hooks up to your home cable TV connection, and then transmits wireless video at home or over the Internet to your PC, Mac, iPad, or iPhone. But thanks to its overly complex setup and lack of DVR control, it's only for the veteran PC tinkerer.

Package, Design, and System Requirements
The retail package includes the Broadway receiver and AC power adapter, an infrared cable that detects cable box commands, an Ethernet cable, an installation CD, and a fold-out paper manual. The Broadway itself is about the size of a home wireless router, and somewhat larger than the diminutive second-generation Apple TV.

The Hauppauge Broadway receiver measures 1.7 by 6.3 by 5.7 inches (HWD) and weighs 1.4 pounds. It's made entirely of black and silver plastic, with a glossy top, matte sides, and a black accent band around the middle. The front contains the power button and a USB port, while the sides are empty. The back panel contains a 10/100 Ethernet port, an antenna or cable TV connector, and S-Video, composite, and stereo audio RCA inputs. There's no HDMI or component video, though. There's also a small port for the infrared receiver, plus two more USB ports. Two fold-up plastic antennae in the back solidify the "router" look. Oddly, all three USB ports don't do anything yet; Hauppauge says only that they're there for "future applications," whatever that means.

To get started, you need a wireless router, an Internet connection, and a TV connection. The latter can be from cable, satellite, or from a digital TV tuner antenna. Hauppauge recommends a home broadband connection with upload speeds of at least 256Kbps, and either a 3G or Wi-Fi hotspot connection for the device on the receiving end. iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch owners need to be running at least iOS 4 or newer. The Broadway supports 802.11b/g/n wireless networks, and works with any PC or Mac running a Web browser with Adobe Flash installed.

Setup, Setup, and More Setup
Unfortunately, setting up the Broadway receiver is a royal pain?just like various other media extender-type boxes before it. During the initial setup, you have to connect the Ethernet cable to your home router, and then enter an obtuse, Web-based setup page at distan.tv, similar to the one you'd find on a Linksys or Belkin wireless router. After that, you have to configure each computer or mobile device to find the Broadway over the Internet, by registering each device with the correct IP address and by mapping a port on your wireless router. The Broadway requires a live Internet connection on your home router and a free Ethernet port. That meant the Netgear N900 ($179.99, 4 stars) router I used was fine, but an Apple AirPort Express router I tried first was totally incompatible.

The fold-up manual, such as it is, is terrible. To cite just one example, it says to put the infrared cable over the clear plastic window on the cable box, yet there are two separate IR receivers on the same wire, with no indication of which one to use and no picture, either. It's quite particular about how you position it. The manual also leaves out the part about connecting your cable box's A/V outputs (either composite or S-video, but no component). You have to magically know to do that somewhere along the way, and no cables are provided in the box, so you're virtually guaranteed a trip to Radio Shack or Staples unless you have an extra set somewhere in the house. None of this will stop someone familiar with PCs and networking, but it's not for the casual user.

Next, you have to program the site to recognize your cable box. My own Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300HD cable box, which is so common it has its own Wikipedia page, is widely used in New York City. But the Broadway didn't recognize it, so I had to manually train the unit to recognize various remote control commands. That's as tedious and confusing as you'd expect. If you use a direct TV antenna connection, you can skip this step, thankfully. There are also spelling and translation errors everywhere, and the distan.tv login page's "Win32 INetAccess.Guid" and "Accesscode" prompt isn't particularly inviting, either.

Testing, Mobile Viewing, and Conclusions
At least I can report the Broadway worked. It usually took about 30 seconds to cue up the live TV picture, even from my home network. During testing, I saw live TV playing relatively smoothly and clearly, if with a slightly grainy picture, inside a Google Chrome browser tab in Windows 7. However, the aspect ratio was incorrect. The software said 16:9, and the cable feed was 16:9, but the view was extra-squished. To change it, you must navigate to a separate Settings tab, which dropped the TV connection.

On the plus side, the Broadway lets you stream live TV to mobile devices, albeit not in the way you'd expect. For example, you can stream live TV to an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. But it doesn't require an app; instead, you visit distan.tv again, this time from Safari. If you have an Android phone or tablet, the Hauppauge Broadway streams to those via Flash, the same way it does on desktop PCs and Macs. But since Adobe has officially canned mobile Flash support going forward, we wouldn't recommend anyone buy this product solely for that purpose.

There's no high-definition support, which isn't a problem on an iPhone or over most Internet connections, but it limits the quality you could have seen on an iPad or laptop PC used locally. Frustratingly, you can't access the DVR portion of your set top box or cue up on-demand programming with the Broadway, either; you can only watch live TV.

Hauppauge makes some excellent products, including their various WinTV cards and the Hauppauge HD PVR ($199, 3 stars), which performed well in our tests. But aside from the Broadway's wireless capability, it's really tough to recommend the Broadway over a Slingbox Solo. The Solo has a more attractive design, offers smoother video quality, has a much simpler setup process, and costs $20 less. Granted, Sling Media charges $29.99 for its iPhone and iPad apps, but its computer clients are free, so it roughly balances out.

If you're not married to the idea of streaming live TV, you have plenty of other options. The Apple TV ($99, 4 stars) is half the price, has a much smoother interface, and lets you watch rented Apple movies, or (for extra cost) anything from Netflix's streaming catalog. For the same $199.99 as the Broadway, you can also buy the least expensive, 4GB Xbox 360 ($199.99, 4 stars). The Xbox 360 doesn't stream cable TV, but it far exceeds the Broadway's multimedia capabilities otherwise, and it's also a powerful gaming console to boot. The Sony PS3 Slim ($249, 4.5 stars) also holds its own and even adds Blu-ray disc playback.

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