ADTH NextGen TV Box review: feature-packed, but lacking polish

Best Prices Today: ADTH NextGen TV Box

If you’re wondering what NextGen TV is, you’re probably not alone. It’s a new digital TV broadcast format (aka ATSC 3.0) that promises lots of advanced features, including interactive services, Dolby audio, and the promise of up to 4K resolution. Stations are already on the air in most cities across the U.S., making NextGen TV available to 75 percent of American households. Some services, such as 4K video, are not yet available. To watch NextGen TV, you’ll need a TV with an ATSC 3.0 tuner or, barring that, a set-top box, such as the ADTH NextGen TV Box reviewed here.

This device supports NextGen TV’s interactive services, and it’s one of the first to support the new encryption scheme that ATSC 3.0 uses, although it depends on an internet connection for that. The ADTH NextGen TV Box delivers stable reception with great picture and audio quality, but its software has lots of bugs, and it received several firmware updates during my review. That made it feel more like a beta release than a finished and polished product. That’s not to say it doesn’t work, just that you’ll need to be patient with its growing pains.

The ADTH NextGen TV Box’s automatic tuning was seamless.

Installation and setup

Getting the box up and running was very simple. First, it asked me to pair the Bluetooth remote with my television, then verify that the remote successfully switched on and off both the box and my TV.

The automatic tuning was seamless, if a little slow. Rather than tune the broadcast band and find all channels in one go, it first tunes looking for ASTC 1.0 stations, which are the majority of those on the air today, and then it tunes the band again looking for ATSC 3.0 NextGen TV signals.

The tuner seemed quite sensitive, matching my Silicon Dust HDHome Run Flex 4K by finding 108 channels, although the signal quality was lower on some channels. More testing will be required to determine if this is an actual problem. Some users have reported overloading problems, although that seems to be associated with older antennas and local 5G interference. A 5G/LTE filter can probably solve that.

NextGen TV performance

One of this tuner’s main features is support for DRM (digital rights management) on NextGen TV broadcasts. Many of the stations broadcasting in the new format have decided to add this encryption, and several early ATSC 3.0 set-top boxes, including Silicon Dust’s popular box, don’t support it.

The ADTH NextGen TV Box will fetch a decryption key and display the channels, but it must be connected to the internet for this. There’s an RJ-45 ethernet port on the back for a hardwired connection, or you can connect the box to your Wi-Fi network (dual-band Wi-Fi 5 is supported, but note that you can use only Wi-Fi or a hardwired network connection). Without an internet connection, you won’t get any picture at all on encrypted NextGen TV channels.

That internet connection also enables interactive TV. ATSC 3.0 stations can broadcast a data service alongside the TV signal; and in the Washington, D.C. area where I tested this, several already do.

Pressing the “right” button on the remote control displays available interactive services. On some stations, the services are as simple as an on-demand weather forecast; others have news and sports reports on demand, just as you’d see on the stations’ websites.

Such broadcaster-provided interactive services are still quite new in the U.S.; but in other countries, such as the U.K., the services are mature and allow for on-demand viewing of complete TV shows from the broadcaster’s online streaming services. Whether that will ever be available in the U.S. remains to be seen, but it’s a neat feature, even if just for on-demand news.

The ADTH NextGen TV Box also supports NextGen TV’s much-heralded local emergency alert function. When I first set up the box and tuned into one of my local stations, I was excited to see my first emergency alert: a local agency warning about staying out of a stream while the deaths of a large number of fish was investigated. This service should allow broadcasters to provide emergency alerts targeting zip codes.

That’s a lot of good things to like about this box over my current HDHomeRun, but I did encounter frustrations. Channel switching, for example, is very slow. Going from channel to channel takes about 3 seconds. First you get a rotating circle on the screen, then a still video image, then the audio begins, and finally you get both audio and video. If you like to channel surf, this and the lackluster electronic program guide (see next section) will drive you insane.

Electronic program guide

The ADTH NextGen TV Box gets program guide data from the over-the-air signals of each broadcaster. That means the price of an internet guide isn’t built into the cost of the receiver, but the guide can be slow to load. Because each channel generally only carries the guide information for its own programming, you have to pretty much go through the entire channel list and sit on each channel for a few seconds to populate the guide. In 2024 on an broadband-connected set-top box, this is a pretty poor design decision.

I do appreciate that the NextGen TV channels are listed first in the program guide rather than at the end. My HDHomeRun groups them at the end of the list, because they have channel numbers in the 100 range.

Software updates

During my testing, I encountered several aspects of ADTH’s user interface that could be improved. When I switched it back on after several hours, for example, the program guide remained where it was when I switched the box off. Imagine sitting down to watch TV at 6 p.m., calling up the TV guide, and it’s still at 7 a.m., when you last used it.

Sure, that’s not the end of the world, but it’s another annoyance: You must scroll forward to see the current programming. What’s more, station logos appear in the program guide along with channel names, but they don’t seem to be stored in memory and disappear when the box is switched off.

Several of the box’s remote control buttons either don’t work consistently across all screens or they’re confusing. To get to the program guide from a channel, you press the back button. Pressing the back button again doesn’t return you to the channel you’re watching, but takes you deeper into the box’s menu system. I found this counterintuitive.

And when you enter manual tuning mode, the box asks for the broadcasting frequency rather than the channel number. Even worse, the frequency needs to be entered in kilohertz; so, instead of scanning to, say, channel 25, I had to run to the internet, look up that channel’s broadcast frequency (about 539MHz in this example), and enter 5-3-9-0-0-0 with the remote. The user interface also defaults to an awful Android on-screen keyboard instead of just a number pad. That’s just unfriendly, and I’m amazed someone thought it was the best way to offer manual tuning.

Should you buy the ADTH NextGen TV Box?

This product was released in August 2023, and it already has 17 cumulative updates as of this writing, with another scheduled for some time in April. You’ll only need to install one update immediately after purchase, but who knows how many after that. This frequency of updates tells me ADTH is still actively developing and troubleshooting this product’s firmware, so perhaps all these little annoyances will eventually disappear.

And on the bright side, the updates are also bringing new features. As I was finalizing my testing, an update added a DVR function. I tested it, but found it only supports immediate recording, programs cannot be scheduled for the future.

When many NextGen TV stations added encryption, screens went black for many early adopters, so it’s great that there’s a set-top box that supports DRM. Unfortunately, the ADTH NextGen TV Box feels like it’s still in development, and buyers are beta testers.

None of the little bugs I’ve encountered impact its great picture quality, but that doesn’t make them any less annoying on a day-to-day basis. If you can put up with the software idiosyncrasies, you’ll probably find a lot to like. If you just want to watch TV, I’d recommend waiting for a few more firmware updates.

Specifications

TV Tuners

• ATSC 1.0 tuner
• ATSC 3.0 NextGen TV tuner
• DRM decryption
• Interactive services support
• Emergency alert support

Video resolution

• 4K HDR Ready
• Up to 4K playback at 60 FPS (AV1, VP9, H.265/HEVC, AVS2-P2)
• Up to 4K playback at 30 FPS (H.264 AVC)
• Up to 1080p playback at 60 FPS (MPEG-4, WMV/VC-1, AVS-P16(AVS+), MPEG-2, MPEG1, RealVideo 8/9/10)

Audio

• Dolby Audio (Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus)
• MP3, AAC, WMA, RM, FLAC, Ogg and programmable with 7.1/5.1 down-mixing

Connectivity

• HDMI
• Analog audio/video out (RCA jack)
• Digital audio out (TOSlink)
• Antenna in (coax)
• USB (for external storage)
• Wi-Fi 5 (802.11 b/g/n/a/ac, 2.4- and 5GHz)
• RJ-45 ethernet
• Bluetooth 5.0

Best Prices Today: ADTH NextGen TV Box