Review of the Monsoon Multimedia HAVA Wireless HD TV Streaming Device

Well we have had the Hava Wireless HD by Monsoon Multimedia in house for a few months now and we have been won over. As we mentioned before we have never really seen why so many people love these placeshifting devices. Well after a few months with the Hava Wireless HD we really can't imagine a world where we don't have the ability to watch our TV anywhere. The ability to provide access to your Tivo anywhere you are still seems amazing to us and the fact that these placeshifting devices exist and work as well as they do is really impressive. Even with the slow networks in this country the quality of the picture that is streamed is very high quality.

Enough preamble lets get to the review.

So setup was about as easy as it comes. After plugging the output of the cable box into the Hava, hooking up the network cable, and pointing the IR blaster at our TV we were done. We went into the office, installed the Hava Player Software and Hava Setup Wizard. We ran the wizard and it immediately detected our Hava HD. After just a few screens of setup to configure all the parameters we had our TV streamed into our office!

So now that we had TV being streamed we had to configure our remote. This process reminded us of the old days of having to look through the manual and pick out the model number of your TV and program it into the remote so that it would work. Essentially we just selected our cable box from a giant list and it displayed the proper graphic for our remote. That alone was really slick. A full representation of the exact remote we had downstairs!

We set out to explore what we could do with this box. We were able to use the software remote exactly like the real one downstairs. All of the features worked thanks to the IR blasters that came with the device. The player also has a built in buffer so we were able to pause the TV and not actually pause our Tivo. It cached all the data locally. The amount it will buffer is completely configurable so you don't end up filling your entire hard drive with random paused shows.

Picture quality was very good. Not perfect, but we weren't expecting perfect for TV being streamed live over our home network. We knew there was going to be a slight amount of lag since we were doing this all over a wireless connection, but we figured a standard def TV signal should not be too much for this box to handle. Unfortunately there was some drop out in signal during things like sporting events where there is a lot of motion on the screen. The remote was also sluggish when responding to commands. Not too make it sound bad, since it really didn't impact the overall experience that much. One day we will look back on this and be amazed that we put up with this, but for us - today - it worked very well.

Like we have said before, we never really saw the appeal of these products before, but now that we have had a chance to test them we see their value. Imagine being on the road for a week and your Tivo records a bunch of shows that you are dying to watch. Well just log on to your Hava, access your Tivo menu and there ya go, your favorite shows right in your hotel room. It really is a very nice convenience and one that we think more people would be into if they got the chance to try it out first.

Just to be up in the office and watching TV streamed from our downstairs system brought a smile to our face. Monsoon has done a great job with this product and it is one that we will definitely recommend to anyone that is in the market for a TV streamer. We will have a future article where we pit the Monsoon against the Slingbox.

At Amazon

October 10, 2007

Review of the Monsoon Multimedia HAVA Wireless HD TV Streaming Device