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RCA PVR Will Use Free Guide+ Program Guide

Posted by timothy on from the sensibility dept.

Mark Leighton Fisher writes "RCA has announced (among other CES goodies) a PVR/DVD player for this year that uses the free GUIDE Plus+ program guide rather than requiring an oncoming program guide contract. Once we bring the price down (yes, I work there) I may break down and get one, as I don't like the program guide fee required on current PVRs. (This may be the first no-program guide-fee commercial PVR.)"

2 of 273 comments (clear)

  1. Unfortunately, not a long term solution by nautical9 · · Score: 5, Informative
    Correct me if I'm wrong, but FreeGuide uses XMLTV to scrape its listings from various internet sites (Zap2It for North America). The problem is that Zap2It is very aware of this package, and although they've been a little forgiving of it so far, their stance is very much that it's a problem they're going to have to deal with (either legally or technically, such as constantly changing the HTML format to make scraping that much harder). I've had discussions about this with Jay Brodsky, their Director of Technology, since I was using XMLTV to redistribute my local listings on the web.

    Their problem is that they spend a lot of money to consolidate the tv schedules - and they offer it free on their site using the advertising model. When people scrape it for their own use, they're subverting the ads, and zap2it loses money instead of making it (bandwidth, servers, staff, syndication). It's a much larger problem because of the way XMLTV scrapes - hundreds, if not thousands of pages must be retrieved and parsed to get the complete schedule.

    Now before you all scream anti-corporate statements, realize that if enough people "steal" their content, they'll simply shut it down, as no company (and no one) wants to lose money.

    For an interesting previous thread on this very topic, check here.

  2. Guide+ by Danielle+Gatton · · Score: 5, Informative

    I have an RCA television with "Guide Plus". I don't have cable,so the TV apparently downloads listings from local broadcasters at night, for a few days at a time. There are small ads on the left sides of the listings, and many times there will be gaps in the listings. The whole system is a little clunky; it takes a while to actually bring up the menu, a while to scroll ahead, and sometimes it'll "crash", causing the TV to suddenly turn off, and all the listings to be lost. The whole thing reminds a little of using Gnome a couple years ago.

    This television was only bought a couple months ago, but hopefully RCA will improve the software before they bring this PVR to market. It's not such a big deal that the software's buggy in my case, because the TV itself is fine; I just don't use the Guide Plus function much. With a PVR, it'd be a much bigger problem, I think.