Beyond TV 3.5 - SnapStream's Bread and Butter Undergoes a Minor Facelift

Well, well, well... When we took a look at Beyond TV 3.5 in one of its latest beta revisions (Aug 24th), SnapStream told us that we should expect BTV 3.5 to go gold in under two weeks. It has been over a month now since then, and SnapStream is ready to go at last to introduce their final product.

What was the hold up? SnapStream's original hope was that BTV 3.5 was going to be the final notch that put them at the same level or maybe even bring them one up over Frey's SageTV 2.0. The problem was that on the feature level, BTV 3.5 was lacking in bringing a superior approach to the multi-tuner system. As for the GUI, we have maintained that, in our opinion, Beyond TV has a better layout and design than SageTV, but with the introduction of Meedio into the mix, we prefer Meedio Essential (ME) over both.

If you haven't read our Beyond TV 3.5 beta and Beyond TV 3 articles, they provide a good context for the purpose of this article. In essence, we had two major points on which we wanted to see improvement:

1. Tying together different broadcast sources (i.e. antenna and standard cable).
2. The UI with less obtrusive information panels.

With a surprising twist, SnapStream has come back to AnandTech with a different look, literally.