The Good: The ability to record shows and rewind what you’re watching are very useful features in the EyeTV apps. The device itself is also very light & compact.
The Bad: You’ll need to rescan for channels every time you connect to the EyeTV, and there’s a reliance on catching a strong signal for it to work.
The Bottom Line: An easy setup process and intuitive app makes the EyeTV a great way to get freeview TV on your iOS, Android or Amazon device.
The decent selection of catchup TV apps on iOS and Android makes it fairly straight forward to keep up to date with your favourite shows, but when it comes to watching them live, you’re typically forced to use Wi-Fi, or worse, your precious cellular data.
Elgato’s EyeTV W is a small, portable device that essentially makes it easy for you to watch live freeview TV wherever you are — assuming you have a a good signal, of course — without the need to use your internet connection. Instead, EyeTV connects to your device via a Wi-Fi hotspot and uses an antenna to fetch the live stream of TV channels.
It’ll set you back £69.95, but unlike its predecessors — EyeTV Mobile and EyeTV Micro, both of which are specifically made for iOS & Android respectively — the EyeTV W is cross-compatible for iOS, Android and even Amazon devices.
Out Of The Box
EyeTV W, along with its two antennas.
Elgato includes a small (MCX) antenna as the most travel-friendly option, but for those times when you need something a little more powerful, there’s a rod antenna, too. That rod antenna has a magnetic base that can be attached to a suction cup — just in case you want to stick it to the window for improving the signal.
There’s also a micro USB cable included in the box for you to recharge the EyeTV, as well as a MCX aerial connector so that you can hook it up to a larger antenna if you’d prefer.
Small, Light & Portable
Portability certainly isn’t an issue with Elgato’s EyeTV W. With the device weighing just 44 grams and sizing up at 64 × 16 × 11 mm, it’s hardly going to be a bother if you throw it in to your bag (or a pocket for that matter).
A compact form factor makes the device very portable.
The glossy plastic build has a role to play in keeping the device light, and while I had my concerns about its durability, Elgato has done well to keep the EyeTV just about dense enough to avoid it feeling flimsy and fragile. Just about.
Speaking of plastic, be warned: the glossy finish makes the EyeTV an absolute fingerprint magnet.
EyeTV Apps For iOS, Android & Amazon
I like what Elgato has done with the EyeTV apps; they’ve been nicely designed, have a simple & intuitive layout and work as they should.
EyeTV app on the iPad.
As well as accessing live TV, the app is able to pull up a 7-day TV guide and can even record what you’re watching for later viewing. Unfortunately, you can’t record stuff in advance though.
What’s really useful is the ability to rewind what you’ve been watching, a feature Elgato call “time shift”. If you happen to miss a part of the show/movie you were watching because someone (annoyingly) decided to disturb you, you can simply rewind live TV and watch it again. It only works if you keep the channel open — so if you happen to switch channels or leave the app, the rewinding functionality won’t work.
Performance
The EyeTV W’s setup process is really simple: you just need to connect your device to it via your Wi-Fi settings, open up the app, “scan for channels” and then you’ll get a list of freeview channels you can start watching.
A small annoyance is the fact that you need to rescan for channels whenever you disconnect from the device, so it isn’t exactly a plug’n’play experience every time. It’s inconvenient, but it seems to be unavoidable given the fact that it’s feeding a live TV broadcast.
During my testing indoors, I was pleased with the EyeTV W’s performance. On the 2nd floor, it was able to scan around 119 freeview channels and on the first floor, 79 channels. Playback was smooth with very few breaks in signal, and the image quality was also very good.
I had a few troubles getting signal on ground floor and outside in the garden though, with the EyeTV struggling to pick up more than 8-9 channels, if any at all sometimes. That was the case whether I used the small antenna or larger rod, and this wound up highlighting a key limitation of the EyeTV: performance is largely dependant on where you are and the kind of signal you’re able to get.
In terms of battery life, my EyeTV W lasted just over four hours during constant, and whenever I used it sporadically, I could even push it to last days. It does drain your device’s battery life though, so be weary of that.
EyeTV W: Verdict
Although Elgato’s EyeTV W is very reliant on a good signal to work properly, it works like a charm once you find a good spot for it. Image quality is great, the connection is stable and the apps offer a few useful features that make it worthwhile.
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