When last we checked in with Fan TV, it was a little known television-discovery app with a big dream: Bring together all the world’s available televised content, whether streaming, live or somewhere in between, together under one digital roof.

Two years and an acquisition by entertainment technology behemoth Rovi later, Fan TV has come a long way toward achieving that goal. Partnering with Time Warner Cable, it released a hardware extension of its service in 2014, a beautifully designed set-top box (and nifty remote control accompaniment) that functioned (for those with a Time Warner subscription) as an all-in-one device for live TV, DVR, VOD and streaming, with one remote and unified discovery. It’s added more than 40 streaming services to its searching and viewing capabilities, and in March of this year, the company released a brand new, completely overhauled iOS app.

While the hardware is a very much meant to be a viewing destination, the new mobile offering takes the emphasis off of watching TV content and puts it squarely on being able to find it, no matter what corner of the streaming universe it’s been tucked away into. It turns out that, for users of the previous manifestation of the app, “there wasn’t any playback on phones,” said Elizabeth Delhagen, Fan TV’s director of marketing and communications. Instead, the phone was “serving as a vehicle for people to organize their entertainment lives” and namely, to look up new shows that came to their attention out in the world, find out where they could be watched, or if currently unavailable, to set up notifications alerting them when that became no longer the case.

The redesigned Fan TV app has an uber-slick interface that lets you search the availability of your shows across services ranging from Hulu and Netflix to smaller players such as Sling TV, Adult Swim, Crackle, Vudu and beyond, as well as see where and when favorites might be broadcast live. The shows can then be saved to a universal watchlist that tracks when they come and go from different places (as they tend to do) and that is synced with the Fan TV set-top box for playback in the living room or on a tablet.

The relationship between cable companies and streaming services is often framed as a bloody battle between cord-cutting enablers and cord-cutting resisters, but the reality is, most viewers are happy to consume their content in both realms.

“We hear a lot of noise about streaming services but they’re usually an add-on to the live TV experience,” said Delhagen. “Live TV and cable TV are still in the majority of households in the US.”

While many viewers have and will go through the effort to cord-cut and tailor their consumption to increasingly precise content desires, many, many others will continue to want to be warmed by the vague blanket cable offers. The nice thing about Fan TV is it caters to all parties, and can continue to do so “either way the industry goes,” said Delhagen, “whether it’s bundled or unbundled.

“For us, a key to this is the development of the entire system as a whole and the partnerships that come in,” she continued. “We’re that glue that holds it all together, because most consumers do want a little bit of everything.”

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