So even if nothing else changes, I'd be really surprised if we didn't see the introduction of the 2nd-gen A21 box coincide with the DirecTV Stream launch.
Well, as became apparent last year, I was wrong about this. That second-generation streaming box, model number A21-KW500, did not get released when AT&T TV was rebranded to DirecTV Stream back in Aug. 2021 as I expected. And over a year later, it
still hasn't been released. It had turned up for certification at the WiFi Alliance back in Mar. 2021. Many of us have concluded that DirecTV may have decided against ever releasing it.
But look what's now come through the WiFi Alliance, with a certification date from just this month, Nov. 4. It's another Humax-made device with a very similar product name/model number: P21-KW500. It's also categorized under "Televisions & Set Top Boxes." See the listings for both it and the never-released A21-KW500 at the link below. (You can also arrive at the page below by doing a "Brand" search on the site for Humax Co., Ltd.)
Neither the WiFi Alliance listing for this device nor their earlier listing for the A21-KW500 mentions DirecTV or AT&T, just Humax. But based on its June 2021 submission to the
FCC, we do know that the A21-KW500 was in fact made by Humax for use with AT&T TV (now known as DirecTV Stream). And both model numbers are very similar to the model numbers assigned to the existing original Osprey box, which DirecTV Stream still sells today:
C71-KW200 and C71-KW400. (The -200 model was made by Samsung while the -400 model was made by WNC.)
So while the listing at the WiFi Alliance website doesn't
conclusively prove that the P21-KW500 is a DirecTV device, its name
strongly suggests so. Could the P21 be the next-gen successor to the original Osprey box? Maybe the A21 was never released because DirecTV decided to go with something even better (or cheaper to build) in the P21. If that's the case, I would imagine it was a decision made by the new team in place at DirecTV after its spin-off from AT&T. (It was clearly the original team in place at AT&T who had made plans with Humax to release the A21.) Perhaps the P21 will serve as an end-client for both DTV Stream and DTV Satellite customers (in the latter case, acting like a replacement for the C61 Genie Mini).
Note that while I was able to find a listing for this new P21 device at the WiFi Alliance, I could not find any listing for it at the FCC site. In the case of the A21, it appeared at the FCC about three months later than at the WiFi Alliance (June 2021 and March 2021, respectively). So maybe the A21 will show up at the FCC come February? DirecTV cannot release it until it's received FCC approval, although
if they ever do release the P21, it could still be several months after passing through there. So who knows when customers will actually get to use the P21, if ever.
I did find one other useful site, though, where the P21 shows up: Geekbench.
As the test results at the above link show, the device is identified as "Humax Pendant" with a quad-core ARMv8 processor running at 2.62 GHz and 3.87 GB of RAM. So apparently the P21 isn't a box but a pendant, i.e. a small-ish dangling dongle, similar in form perhaps to the current Chromecast with Google TV or the 3rd-gen Amazon Fire TV pendant.
When tested back on 4/8/22, it got a single-core score of 168 and a multi-core score of 504 on the Geekbench 5 test. And it runs Android 11, strongly suggesting that this will be an app-based streaming device. (The listings at WiFi Alliance for both the P21 and A21 only mention that they run the Linux OS; Android is a specific variant of Linux.)
Here are the Geekbench results for the current Osprey, the C71, running Android 10, also tested this past spring:
As you can see, the C71's single-core scores average about 119 and its multi-core scores about 395. So the P21 scores about 41% better on single-core and about 28% better on multi-core, which isn't surprising given its faster processor speed (2.62 GHz vs. 1.66 GHz for the C71).
All of this may amount to nothing. I suppose it's possible that the P21 is being made by Humax for some client
other than DirecTV, although that seems very unlikely given DirecTV's model numbering system. It's also possible that the P21, like the A21 before it, never gets released. Although I can't see why they'd go to the expense of creating and certifying multiple hardware models that never see the light of day. Time will tell, I guess...
