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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."
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?
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/
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*/
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.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?
--
"Don't trolls get tired?"
TV=TeleVision
I/O=Input/Output
TiVo=Tele-input-Vision-output
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
You don't like capitalism? You don't like people doing things to make money? I'm having a hell of a time finding a gardener who isn't in it for the money. How about coming over and cleaning up my yard for free?
-jon
Remember Amalek.
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 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...
I got my TiVo about two weeks ago. It's absolutely fantastic. I hope that this means that TiVo is doing well. If you'd like to get a TiVo for free, they've got an essay contest going on right now, just write 250 words at this site, they give away at least 10 per day. I know four people who have won.
If you're interested, you can also read my review of my TiVo. I'm seriously thinking about putting in a bigger drive, my weenie 14 hour model simply isn't big enough to cover me being gone for 4 days at a time. Everyone who I've let play with my TiVo said "This is cool, I have to get one". It's one of those devices that is hard to explain in 30 seconds to a non-technical user, but let them play with it for a bit, and they realize the possibilities.
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When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein