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ReplayTV Quits Hardware Biz, Licenses Technology
crazyj writes: "According to this article, Digital Video Recorder maker ReplayTV is calling it quits in the hardware business. Instead, they plan to cut staff and license their technology. Apparently, the competition from TiVo was too much."
A while back, Echostar joined forces with ReplayTV shortly after the MS WebTV DishPlayer was released. This may just be a sign that things are going well enough for ReplayTV on a new sat recorder, and they don't need the consumer side on the table anymore. I love my 40GB DishPlayer (Upgraded with no hacks, just swapped the drive), and would love to see an even more stable Replay based Dish system.
And Tivo's don't have a 30 second skip? Wow, After using that on my DishPlayer for the past year, it would take a while to get used to another way of commercial skipping.
Wow, thanks a crapload for that link... I had no idea they gave so many away. I just won a TiVo from the contest, this really makes my day. Thanks!
So if they're no longer going to be in the hardware business, does that mean that they will let consumers upgrade their own units by adding new drives?
...the technology with the worse name wins.
Consumers would rather pay $400 and $10 a month than pay $600-700 all at once. I can do the math, and I KNOW I'm paying more, but the convenience of not paying all at once is VERY nice. Plus, if TiVo were to go under in the next year, I'm not out the entire amount. And if I like the service, I don't mind paying an extra $10 a month to make sure I don't lose it.
Also, TiVo reportedly has a better UI. Take that for what it's worth.
On a side note, this Sony DirecTV with TiVo unit is pretty damn slick. It records the satellite feed, so you get the same quality as the feed all the time. No additional compression. I haven't played with it too much yet, but I gotta tell ya, it's pretty awesome.
or was that someone else who got slimed by the hollywood scumbags?
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Well, you could get the 14 Hour model for $99, plus $10/month (or $200 for lifetime). Adding another disk was pretty easy and relatively cheap, since I found a 60GB drive at Staples for ~$160.
The real reason I got my TiVo was that I found myself wanting to vege at the end of the day, and there'd be nothing but crap on cable. I'd waste an hour or two channel surfing trying to find stuff I wanted to watch.
Now with the tivo I come home and can decide to watch an hour or two of the practice, or some Simpsons, or part of the BattleBot marathon that it picked up while we were gone over Thanksgiving.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
the comparison chart listed it as available in version 2.0....
this thread on the TiVo forums discuss the dates as to when 2.0 will be out. appears i mis-posted that this was an available feature, but it does appear that it is on the horizon.
my apologies for the confusion.
/* Half alive and half dead too, work is for suckers and the sucker is you. - "Half-life" by Local H*/
We both get what we want.
No, this has nothing to do with socialism; what you are describing is a barter system. There's a quid pro quo in barter, which doesn't exist in a Communist (not socialist, as you wrongly stated) system. For Communism, it's from each according to their means to each according to their needs. You would just go yard to yard, fixing up people's gardens if they needed it. I, on the other hand, would go from house to house, installing video cards as desired. If you happened to fix my garden and I your PC, it's just a happy coincidence as we were both self-motivated to do this because we are good Communist folk. Needless to say, trying to find 2 people to do things out of the goodness of their hearts is hard; getting an entire country (much less an entire planet) to do so is impossible. So, Communist countries have tended to resort to force to make those selfish individuals do what's best for everyone, which somehow misses the original point, but it keeps the ruling class happy.
Socialism, as it is usually implemented, has a third party redistributing goods and services. So if enough people thought they deserved nice gardens, the government would decide what a "nice" garden is, hires a bunch of people to work as gardeners as per the spec, and then taxes other people to fund it.
The difference between barter and capitalism is that we both agree to price our goods (your gardening skills, my pc installation knowledge) against a third standard. We call that third standard money. The motivation is the same (greed, improving your personal situation) in barter as in capitalism, just the medium for trade is better, as I am able to get gardening done even if I cannot provide any good or service to the gardener; I give him money.
The bosses control the means to production, we do all the work, and they get rich.
If you want to control the means of production, form your own company. In the US, the vast majority of people are employed by companies with fewer than 25 employees. Relative to most other places on the planet, it's easy to start a company and join the rich ruling class. Of course, your company could suck, and you could end up broke. The greater the risks you take, the greater the rewards and penalites. If you don't like it, stay a peon. But don't bitch about it, because no one is forcing you to be one. If your country's implementation of capitalism sucks, don't blame the US and don't blame capitalism.
So, now that you know something about econ, maybe you can make an intelligent argument. But I doubt you will.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
Here is a comparison between the two. i have a TiVO and have been going over the details of the unit with interested people at work. IMHO, the TiVo has several features which make it a much better unit than the Replay, such as:
1. Converting the buffering to recording (Replay doesn't support this.)
2. Browse all channels by time (Replay has a truly crappy channel interface compared with TiVo.)
3. Setting a "Season Pass" for a show on any timeslot (Replay doesn't support this.)
there are a bunch more. ReplayTV is failing b/c it's business model was flawed (hmmm - anyone remember the Macintosh from the 80s...yeah, don't license the hardware) and b/c it lacks some great features that TiVo has...30 second skip button be damned.
/* Half alive and half dead too, work is for suckers and the sucker is you. - "Half-life" by Local H*/
It's been said to be on hold until Tivo finishes up the lawsuit they are involved in with Gemstar.
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- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
At this point, isn't TiVO quickly winning the mindshare war?
Why license ReplayTV instead of TiVO?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
What the digital tv recorders really need is a storage medium to archive programs. Personally, there are some times I'd like to record something "forever." Like a friend of mine appears in a commercial or an interview on a show. Or whatever; you get the point.
What would be great is a CD-RW drive built in that allows you to "archive to disk." If I can record onto SuperVHS, what's the problem with recording to disk from a digital source? The difference is not that large.
Sure, you can say I can just upgrade my hard drives and keep it forever. That doesn't really work long-term because over the course of 5 years I may want to store dozens of recordings, which means my usable space becomes smaller and smaller.
For legal reasons, there is some buzz that because it's a digital recording, the quality is higher than VHS and thus would be more problematic for the broadcasters who would like to limit the recording and re-recording of their material. I say that's crap. Like I mentioned above, SuperVHS exists (and I personally have a SuperVHS VCR) and it records in a quality superior to VHS. They're legal. Why not make a digital VCR with removable media legal? Same difference. It's going to happen, it's just a matter of who's going to do it first. Imagine burning a VCD of the latest Simpson's Halloween special with your TiVo2 and taking it over a friend's house to pop into their DVD player. Mmmmm.
The differences are
- my Tivo fits into my entertainment center
- I don't have to stop using it when my daughter wants to print out her term paper
- with rebates it cost about $300 w/lifetime service, vs. $1000-$2000 for your computer
- I don't have to write any scripts/programs
- remote controlled
- blah blah blah
You just can't hit the features vs. price point on your own.As far as which is better, keep in mind that TiVo is currently succumbing to the arrogance of power. Sony chose TiVo for its box; that alone should imply something. TiVo is now advertising in sports events. All the signs of a bloated company about to explode from its own, self-inflicted infestation. The "TiVo runs Linux" issue seems to be the only beneficial aspect of TiVo; the rest reeks of the capitalist status quo.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Tivo Good Stuff
- Records programs that it thinks you might like based on previously expressed preference.
- More intuitive interface (though both are really easy)
- Products like the integrated DirecTV/Tivo, which can record DirecTV at full-resolution, without the extraneous decode/encode cycle that occurs with a seperate unit
- Excellent quality on recordings
- Friendly towards capacity hacks
Tivo Bad Stuff- Only pause live TV for 30 minutes, unless you're actually recording that channel.
ReplayTV Good Stuff- Pause live TV for up to 7 hours
- 30-second skip
ReplayTV Bad Stuff- Lousy encoding. Bright reds, such as those often found in the simpsons, sometimes get encoded as green (apparently a bit overflow?)... looks terrible when it happens.
- Seems less reliable than Tivo. Both have crashed for me, but Tivo has crashed about 6 times in a year or so, whereas ReplayTV has crashed that many times in about 3 or 4 months.
- Ads displayed when you hit pause, some of which contain colour patterns which can cause burn-in.
All in all, they're both ludicrously cool products, but I know of no reason why ReplayTV is technically superior to TiVo in any significant manner.What did you think made ReplayTV technically superior to TiVo?
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"Don't trolls get tired?"
Ah, I had this problem with both TiVo and ReplayTV, since I get my signal by DirecTV, and didn't really want to buy multiple receivers for every tv.
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"Don't trolls get tired?"
There have been several posts asking "why can't I do this on my PC?", so I thought it best to put this out here. There is a software-based Tivo-like program called ShowShifter at www.showshifter.com that is in beta. No linux version yet, but the bits and pieces for a linux recorder are already there-- there are linux drivers for the very common BT848 video-capture chipset and software for encoding, as well as nifty scheduling tools like cron. If somebody wrapped it up in a nice GUI, we'd already be done!
Go to a store and compare the ReplayTV and the TiVo side by side. Use the interface..mess with the remotes. I think you'll see why TiVo is winning. Sure, there is a service fee but if you get the lifetime the TiVo box costs the same or less than the ReplayTV.
The only feature the TiVo is missing over ReplayTV is 30 second skip... but after using the fast forward on TiVo a few times you know when to stop and hit play...it even adjusts back a little for your reaction time. The reason TiVo didn't want the 30 second skip is that they are working deals with advertisers and they didn't want to make them mad. On some commercials you will get a small TiVo icon (called a TiVomatic) where you can hit one button to tell the TiVo to record the show currently being advertised.
Whenver one of these stories comes up, a number of people always say you can build a PC to do it just as well. Try it. The great thing about the TiVo is the integration in to the audio/video setup. I can't imagine watching TV without one now. Sure, a PC can record shows in to mpeg...but they don't record things I might like (which get overwritten by things I want recorded when out of space). The PC doesn't have the great interface... It doesn't have a lot of things, and the TiVo costs less than a new high speed video card.
It uses WebTV's "Personal TV" service at $10/month. So, I basically got a satellite system and digital recorder for free. How's that for a price point?
It is missing some features that Tivo has that I'd like. (I had been planning to get a dish and then a Tivo. I may still get a Tivo.) For instance, it doesn't have the learning AI or a great "season ticket" type feature (basically will record same time/channel weekly), but the recording is integrated into the dish's channel browsing and searches. I'd also like to be able to do more multiplexing (ie, watching something different than I'm recording). It directly streams the MPEG-2 video from the dish to the disk, so recorded programs look virtually identical to the live version. Also, pausing live TV is only limited by disk space, unlike what I've heard about Tivo (30 min). There is a site (can't find URL right now) indicating basic hacks of this thing, basically replacing the 17GB with a larger disk. I may try an 80GB which would boost the recording time from 12hrs to 56hrs or so.
If I was so inclined, the Dishplayer also does WebTV access and there is an IR keyboard for that or searching the TV listings.
Overall, I think the integration of these things with dishes works well since the dishes are so closely tied to the service model and contracts. To me and others getting the dish, the cost of Personal TV is about the same as one of the movie packages on my bill.
LetterJ
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
The last software update from ReplayTV added a manual record option, although I haven't tried using it yet.
What I want is a feature that will compensate for schedule shifts caused by football games or other sporting events. That might be tough to do.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I love terms that only a directv pirate would use. So what software are you running? :-)
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"Don't trolls get tired?"
Yeah, you're right, this isn't the technology for people who need their cable/antenna feeds. I get my major locals via DirecTV, so the only thing's I lose are UPN, and WB. No loss as far as I'm concerned.
I used to use cable as a backup, but the cable went out more than directv, and the picture quality was horrid. i'll take mpeg artifacts over massive static, any day.
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"Don't trolls get tired?"
This link comparing the two companies illustrates many of the differences such as price, Duplicate episode recording, and schedule conflicts.
You can also see some ReplayTV Notes that show what exactly the company was into.
Overall I am dissapointed that such a good service was run out of business prematurely by a great marketing job by a competitor.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Don't need it. I got mine a week and a half ago and have already mastered 3x ff (which is actually around 60x speed). The jumpback feature lets you hit play when you see the show and it jumps back a bit, and you see the start. Its not hard.
You have a reference? I'd love to change that, but a glance around the message boards didn't give me a lead on that particular hack, and I'd love to do it.
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"Don't trolls get tired?"
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You are a fucking moron.
I got my TiVo yesterday, and immediately added a second 30Gb drive (thanks to the Hack Tivo FAQ). Worked great. I got to watch Star Trek Voyager this morning for the first time since they moved it to midnight. Now if only I can keep my step daughter from filling the damn thing with General Hospital and Real World.
I love this technology, and I'm especially glad that the market leader is using Linux and turning a blind eye to people making their own hardware upgrades. However, I'm sticking to the monthly subscription until I know it isn't going to be eclipsed by tomorrow's technology.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
The 14 hour model by itself is pretty useless if you want to store anything at all, since it's only like 8 hours at watchable quality. And when I think of price, the long-term subscription cost has to be taken into account.
And while it's certainly viable for tech-savvy folks to upgrade a cheap Tivo into something useful, how many normal folks are even going to know that it's possible? And of those, how many are going to feel comfortable on the Linux command-line?
I'm not bashing it at all - personally I think my Tivo really is 'revolutionary' in that you watch what you want when you want in the lowest-maintenance way possible. I just know a lot of folks that are put off by the price tag.
Oh no. You are sending money to WebTV aka M$ boxtop. Look out for the /. flames!
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Its like $0.25 for an hour of video tape
and $4.00 for a hour of compressed disk TV (gigabyte). The ratio has always been around 10-20x. Five years from now, move the decimal place left again for both.
So the price has to be based on other factors such as functionality and convenience. I think there are enough of these to keep Replay/TiVo promising.
It's in the TiVo hack FAQ at http://www.tivofaq.com/hack/faq.html. Look for the LIVE_CACHE_SIZE variable.
FP
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Hardware is a brutal business, as American TV, VCR, IBM clone, and now Computer VCR makers have found out. Sell the software and content to manage the hardware. In some cases you may want to be in the hardware end for a year or two (MicroSoft plan?) to jumpstart the software.
Maybe they shouldn't have stood by while Panasonic released a defective version of their product -- the Showstopper -- with Macrovision detection -- highly succeptable to false positives -- on the inputs.
Now that they've acquired a reputation for delivering a shoddy product, there isn't much left for them to do but license out the technology. Perhaps others can avoid the Showstopper mistake.
I think the biggest obstacle for digital video recorders to become mainstream is the price point. Until they can get knocked down to VCR territory in that respect, they will just be geek toys for the most part. Whether or not that can happen, though, is the question, since they are already losing money on the hardware (which is why Replay is getting out of that side of the business).
TiVo and ReplayTV aren't that different. The only comparison I can think is that TiVo has the intelligent program that records programs it thinks you'd enjoy. I'm pretty sure this feature isn't available on the ReplayTV. I just think that people tried TiVo before ReplayTV and that is what killed it. As far as I know, TiVo is fairing quite well.
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Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
My point is, the TiVo folks went the right route, and Replay botched it. The results are rather plain to see.
I guess I'd want to re-arrange about a weeks worth of TV viewing for watching at geek-convenient times, i.e. about 20 hours. There are
occasions when I'd get interested in a TV series mid-season and wished to have access to earlier episodes.
Not only that, there are useful cases where you might want to see what is going on during the commecials - for example, sometimes for "preview" commercials used to indicate up-coming episodes or new shows, an icon will appear during the commercial, allowing you to press SELECT and have Tivo automatically add that program to your TODO list. Even skipping at full speed you can usually see the icon and press SELECT, or at least go back and see what the deal was. You wouldn't even be aware of this feature if you simply skipped blindly ahead 30 seconds.
And as the previous poster points out, it's actually better to skip the Tivo way, because you have control over when you jump back to real time.
The red encoded as green is actually a known issue, so I'm surprised you haven't run into it. I'm assuming that it must be something signal specific (maybe my signal is a tad hot or something?). Whatever it is, it's a publicly admitted problem, and one that a Tivo plugged into the same spot doesn't experience
I've crashed them just by using them. I have some weird knack for finding ways to break software that nobody else notices. Just yesterday I got a Tivo into a mode where while displaying guide data, the first two lines of guide data would be blank... <shrug> it happens. no big deal, just a minor annoyance.
As for Replay's ability to record by preference, it doesn't touch Tivo. Tivo, after using a unit for a few weeks, will record almost nothing that you don't like, and it only does this with extra space anyway, so if you fill to capacity, it just won't do that. I, however, record very little with my main Tivo... one or two shows a day, basically. This means that the auto-disk-fill feature is pretty kickass for me.
I didn't know about this new mode, I'll have to check it out when I go home, see what I haven't been paying attention to.
One bad thing about both, that I forgot.... No HDTV recording.... maybe in a few years, I guess.
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"Don't trolls get tired?"
I think ReplayTV is seeing the difference between a service-based business model vs. a hardware-based business model. TiVo has never sold their own hardware - they license the design to Philips-Magnavox and Sony. TiVo then collects a monthly/yearly/lifetime fee for service, without which the box is pretty much a live TV-only device. ReplayTV has always included their service as part of the purchase price, which they've had to reduce to compete with TiVo on the shelf. TiVo's been eating their lunch.
Panasonic's OEM version of the ReplayTV has been selling much better than ReplayTV's own model (ah, the benefits of brand recognition). So it makes a lot of sense to get rid of the overhead, find one or two more manufacturers to sign to licensing deals, and maybe change the service to a TiVo-style pay-for-play service (grandfathering existing customers, of course ;) ).
Right...
Hey HackTivo types - what would it take to create a "30 Sec Skip" feature on Tivo, since that was the only really good feature on Replay (and it was also what the broadcasters squawked most loudly about)? I have no idea but I bet one of y'all might...
sulli
RTFJ.