Review: Caavo

When I was growing up, watching TV was something even my grandparents had figured out. You picked up the TV remote, and surfed to the channel you wanted to watch. But, times have changed.

If you’re like me, you watch most of your TV through Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, and a dozen other video apps, and probably have another box, maybe a Roku or Apple TV, with yet another remote control---maybe a remote for your soundbar. I also own a PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. Oh, and a Chromecast, in case I want to shoot a YouTube video to my TV screen.

There are at least half a dozen remotes and game controllers on my coffee table at any given time, while the TV shows and movies I want to watch are scattered across apps on multiple devices. In other words, I’m the ideal customer for Caavo.

We live in an era where more content is available than we know how to find. It’s a problem, and the makers of Caavo think they’ve found a solution, albeit a costly one. Caavo is a $400 box that promises to control all the other boxes connected to your TV with a single remote, so you can jump to your favorite apps, or go directly to a TV show with a few clicks (or a voice search), regardless of what box it’s on.

Caavo

Caavo doesn’t run any apps itself. Instead, it’s trying to be the ultimate middleman: a single elegant remote control and beautiful receiver box with a wooden lid (available in several types of wood, like bamboo), that brings order to the jungle of madness that’s connected to your HD or 4K TV. It stitches together all the cable TV boxes, DVD players, Blu-Ray players, game consoles, and streaming devices you own, letting you control them all with one remote control and auto swap between them (or jump right to your TV shows) with ease.

The heart of Caavo is its receiver box, which is a rectangular slab with a long row of eight HDMI ports, a couple USB slots, ethernet, an infrared port, a power cord, and an HDMI-out port. To set it up, you basically have to unplug every box from your TV and plug it straight into Caavo. Then you just have to set it up. Sadly, that’s not always as simple as it should be.

Hopefully your setup will go smoother than mine, which was fraught with small, frustrating challenges. For all its proposed convenience, it’s clear that Caavo is still a very new, beta product that looks more elegant than it works (at least, for now). Here were my specific pain points:

Sticks Don’t Fit: The receiver has a row of 15 lovely rubberized pegs that are meant to help guide your HDMI cords out of the back of the box with some dignity, but they are immovable and don’t have enough space between them, meaning some devices just won’t fit. My Roku Streaming Stick+, for instance, was too long. Caavo includes one HDMI extender, but it may not be enough, especially if you also own a Fire TV stick or Chromecast, both of which I had to find an extension cords for or run out the side. It’s clear that the Caavo wasn’t made to fit sticks, despite the fact that they’re very popular. I kept wishing I could unscrew some of the pegs to fit my devices better.

Though it does work on 4K TVs, if you have a high-end set you should know this has no HDR or Dolby Atmos support.

Caavo

Menu Rage: When you get your sources hooked up and hide the mess of cords coming out the back, you’ll start the onscreen setup, which is incredibly easy, like an Apple device, unless you have an less common device hooked in or don’t understand a prompt. It ended up taking me about two hours because I didn’t get things just right.

If you get stuck on any one part of the rigidly linear setup process, you can't skip ahead or set anything else up until you figure out the problem with that particular device. There are times when the setup process trains you to hit weird buttons (Share for no, voice button for yes) and then on the very next screen has a completely different confirmation method.

My Roku set up fine, but Fire TV did not. It told me to hunt for a Caavo TV app in the Amazon app store to get it to work, but I had trouble locating it and eventually had to install it from a PC. I also tried to hook up an unknown device, my Super Nt game console. Despite asking if it was a game console, Caavo did not understand that it had a Bluetooth controller, not an infrared remote control. It also refused to let me register the device without a precise model number.

My Sonos soundbar caused trouble, as well. Caavo wanted to connect via Wi-Fi to it, but couldn’t connect unless I also had Caavo on Wi-Fi. So I unplugged it from ethernet and had to reset its settings to the exact Wi-Fi network as the Sonos. Why it couldn’t connect via Wi-Fi while on ethernet even on the same home network, I do not know.

App Trouble: The other benefit of Caavo is that it can deeplink directly to TV shows in some apps. To do this, you must also use a PC to create a Caavo account and link them up. Currently, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, HBO, Sling TV, and a few others are available. The PC setup was also rigidly linear, forcing you to sign up for each service one by one in a row. If you make a mistake or forget a login password, you have to start from scratch. HBO Go never worked for me at all because my TV provider wasn’t listed, and Sling TV apparently does not require a login, but Caavo didn’t tell me that during setup, which confused me so much I tried to set it up several more times thinking I had made a mistake.

Many of these setup issues could be fixed with a simple firmware update in the future. Hopefully they will be. But as they say, “no pain, no gain.” I lost an afternoon setting Caavo up, but once I did, things got a lot better.

Rattled by my many stymied attempts to set Caavo up, I mostly noticed flaws during my first day with Caavo, though it still managed to get a couple smiles out of me. One of the cooler features of Caavo is the voice search. You hold down the mic button and tell it what you want to watch, and it is supposed to deeplink you directly into the app, like Netflix, where the show is, and even play the episode you left off on. Sometimes this works. Many times it doesn’t. For example, a search for “Star Trek” only brought up the 2009 movie, despite the fact that Netflix has every Star Trek TV show that ever aired. I have no defense why I watch the TV show Nashville, but I do, and a search for that brought up the show, but failed to connect me to the episode I left off at. When it does work, it's like magic.

Alexa voice search is also active (in beta). I was able to use my Alexa speaker to say "Alexa, tell Caavo to search for Stranger Things" and up it came instantly on my TV. Voice searches on the remote and Alexa can also directly open apps, like "watch YouTube" to open YouTube or devices ("watch Roku" to open Roku). You have to get the commands just right, but it's quite convenient when it works. Sadly, Caavo cannot deeplink into apps on any game console. You can only control the menus, though that's a step up since official remotes for the three major systems are hard to find or nonexistent.

Finally, though you can search for a TV show using voice, you cannot search for, say, the CNN channel on a live TV app like Sling TV. (I’m told this works with Cable TV boxes, but I don’t have cable so I was unable to test this feature.) A Caavo representative told me features like this, and support for deep linking in more streaming apps, will come in the future.

After grumbling for a while about what Caavo can’t do, I began to notice how much simpler it was making my TV time. It’s fun to search up shows and usually they magically appear and seamlessly take you to the app of choice. The voice recognition is also pretty good and Caavo switches between devices better than anything I’ve ever used.

Caavo

Caavo's real game changing asset is its remote. Using only a directional pad and a few other buttons, like Home and Back, I was able to navigate the menus of all six of my different streaming devices and game consoles, opening apps and browsing as I pleased. It’s remarkable how well it maps control and buttons for each device, even working with my old plasma TV flawlessly. Occasionally there was a bit of lag or something went wrong, but showstopping crashes were rare.

A key ingredient of the Caavo remote’s secret sauce is its touch-sensitive buttons. Even if you are sitting in the dark, just touch your finger to one of the buttons and a small onscreen prompt will tell you exactly what that button does. It puts universal remotes like the Logitech Harmony to shame—even in battery life. Those remotes get around two days of juice, but the Caavo remote will stay powered for months at a time, and charges easily with a Micro USB cord.

Pressing the big silver Caavo button brings up a simple menu allowing you to conveniently switch between devices or jump right into connected streaming apps.

I also love that Caavo senses if you use any of your old remotes, and automatically switches to that device. If I hit the PS button on my PS4 controller, up pops the PlayStation on my TV quicker than I can sit down. If I press the Roku power button, there it is on the screen. All your old remotes work perfectly and you never have to worry about pressing the Input button on your TV remote again to switch between devices. It’s all automatic. Power the Caavo on or off and it will turn off your TV and anything else, as well. It just works.

Setting up the Caavo could be a lot easier, to put it mildly, but for me the juice was worth the squeeze. A lot of the advertised app deeplinking and voice search doesn’t yet feel complete, and Caavo will need to keep adding features to live up to its own hype. But as a universal remote and automatic TV input switcher, Caavo is unlike anything else out there. Whether that’s worth $400 is debatable, but Caavo is creating a space all its own. Personally, I’m already dreading the day I’ll have enjoy watching TV without it.