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RCA PVR Will Use Free Guide+ Program Guide
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.)"
RCA is notorious for making crappy products. (My apologies to the poster.) I worked at radio shack and one of the first thing I noticed was how shoddy all of the RCA products were. A lot of returns on these items, especially the DVD players. Also, an RCA Lyra player I once had was a total piece of crap. I've learned my lesson about buying stuff from them.
God is real unless declared integer.
Tivo charges for their guide because they are providing a service. They sell their PVR for almost no profit whatsoever; unlike RCA, they have no other source of income to keep their PVR afloat until the PVR market takes off.
I don't mind supporting Tivo with a monthly charge, as long as I get service for my money. The program guide itself is worth the cost, and the convenience of Tivo is well worth the initial $200 outlay.
All-in-all, I figure if I can spend $12/month to support my Earth And Beyond habit, I can shell out $10/month for Tivo.
Just my $.02. Different people place different values on different things, so YMMV (your money may vary).
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Tivo doesn't make their pvr. They designed it, but actually subsidize other mfr's to make them for sale.
Tivo makes their money only on subscriptions.
This *could* put Tivo out of business. I can only hope that this at least makes them rethink their position on selling, effectively, advertising space on their customer's pvrs. (I'm referring to Tivo's policy of taking money to record programs and push them on the customer, with the customer being unable to delete them for 7 days.)
that's nice...for people who use dishnetwork anyway. This is a genralized device.
> (I'm referring to Tivo's policy of taking money to
> record programs and push them on the customer, with
> the customer being unable to delete them for 7
> days.)
Heh, you mean that star menu option at the very very bottom of the menu? The one with the big star next to it so you can see if its there and not even glance in its area to read it if so?
Yes, those shows that only take up space on the root disk where it doesnt use a single bit from the volume the video is recorded to are so bad for me.
I know, lets boycott!
"I don't like the program guide fee required on current PVRs."
You know, this subject comes up every time an article featuring the TiVo is posted, and every time someone gets "+5, Insightful" for whining about the TiVo monthly fee.
My TiVo monthly fee is $4.95. Yes, less than five dollars a month. That's cheaper than the burrito I ate for lunch today! For everything that TiVo gives me, $5 is chump change. Plus, you can do yearly and/or lifetime subscriptions. It's also lumped in with my DirecTV bill, so I don't get a separate "TiVo bill" that I have to worry about paying. What is the big deal?
I get 500+ channels plus HBO, local channels, and TiVo for less than $60 a month. Digital cable would give me the same thing without TiVo for $85/month. You want value? Buy a DirecTV+TiVo. But please, stop whining about the subscription. Every damn TiVo owner in the world will tell you that the $4.95 is money well-spent on a TiVo.
The only people I hear complaining are people who think the TiVo is a glorified VCR. The TiVo is not a VCR with a monthly fee! It is a totally different way to watch TV. It frees you from cheesy "primetime" TV. I told my TiVo to tape every Steve Martin movie that was on, regardless of any channel it was on. Every once in a while I turn the TiVo on to find a Steve Martin movie recorded and waiting for me to watch! I can order and record Pay-Per-View with one click. I have completely foregone Blockbuster (and I say "Good Riddance!") Five dollars a month is worth it to watch every Steve Martin classic, get rid of video store late fees, and give up on crappy primetime TV. (Hmm, the Simpsons was on at 6PM... I think I'll just watch that at 9PM instead of whatever is on now!)
I do not work at TiVo. I do not work at DirecTV. I am, however, a satisfied customer of both. (Oh, and has your cable company lowered your monthly cable bill this year? DirecTV lowered my monthly bill TWICE in 2002. What more can I ask for?)
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
Lets see. On one hand I have a brand name product with a reputation of not putting out the greatest quality product (RCA) on the other I have the leader of the PVR pack (TiVo).
RCA expects an MSRP of $600 for this product.
TiVo charges $150 for a 60 hour unit right now (see http://www.tivo.com)
RCA doesn't charge a fee for guide info.
TiVo charges $13/mo, or you can get a lifetime subscription for $250.
With that price difference it would take 3 years before you broke even on the RCA purchase. And if you bought the TiVo lifetime subscription you'd have $200 with which to buy TiVo's new Media Center software as well as a nice region free DVD player.
Or you could just buy the Toshiba DVD/TiVo device that was also announced at CES.
Sorry, but RCA sucks and you can have my TiVo when you pry it from my cold dead fingers.
and I'd just like to provide some info for others thinking about getting one themselves. I haven't personally used a Tivo or Replay so I can't really say whats best first hand, but I read lots of reviews before deciding on the RCA Scenium.
I mostly chose it for two reasons. It is a DVD player in addition to a PVR, which is great if you don't already have one as with me. I have no complaints about its DVD playing functionality whatsoever.
The other reason is, as the article points out, that it doesnt require a channel guide subscription. I didn't want to add another monthly bill to my family's life, nor pay a lifetime (of the unit) fee when the companies' lives may be even shorter than the average electronic appliance. My family pays the local cable service about ten bucks a month to have nice reception of local stations plus TNT, CSPAN and the other junk they throw in. Thus our situation as far as channels go, may be unusual, but it is an issue. The guide is flaky! When told we don't have cable it gets quite a few broadcast stations that we dont receive and associates some of the ones we do with the incorrect channels. When told we have cable it only gets the listings for TNT and the Food network consistently correct, though there was one day, since christmas that the listings seemed pretty complete across the board. I havent put a whole lot of time into figuring it out since you only get the new listing after leaving the unit off overnight, but I'm pretty sure we're hosed as far as the guide goes. That sucks, but it would be OK if the thing were reliable for doing scheduled recordings ala a vcr. No such luck! Instead of recording the scheduled show it sometimes (maybe 30%) goes to the menu and says "an error has occured". Maybe these are simple software problems that will go away with the next revision, but guess what!? the firmware is not updatable.
At $600 it makes no sense, one could buy a TiVo and a "lifetime" subscription for less, and hope that the "lifetime" is more than a year or so. However, the monthly fee is certainly a reason that many including myself would not but a TiVo. Like others I hope that RCA will realize they have to drop the price of the PVR to be competitive, or that someone else like Apex will get into the market and undercut RCA. It's nice to see the subscription model broken, even if the product isn't reasonably priced yet.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
..."it does irk me that the service ... is ... the stuff you can get on line for free..."
Great! Let me know where I can go to a website and see every Steve Martin movie that is coming up in the next two weeks, with specific channel numbers, dates, and times.
And which website was it where I could go and click on MOVIES, and then type in "Steve Martin", and have it record all of those movies automatically?
That is why I pay TiVo $4.95 a month.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
And the total is probably about the same or less than the price of the RCA box.
If Chaos Theory has taught us anything, it's that we must kill all the butterflies.
RCA's Guide Plus has nothing to do with XMLTV, it's a service they've been offering for years. I believe it's exclusive to RCA and it pulls TV guide data off the air. I'm not sure of the quality of the listings or the service's reliability.
About XMLTV: Zap2it makes their listings freely accessible. As far as I'm concerned there's no contract where I agreed to view their ads as well as their content. They're free to implement technical measures to prevent people from scraping their listings, but until then I see nothing wrong with it. The one thing that concerns me is the bandwidth, I wasn't aware that the XMLTV grabber gets hundreds of pages. I might not want to put that much load on their servers.
Let's not get it in our heads that this is stealing, though. Anti-leech has the same philosophy, they consider it theft if you block a site's popups, view a site's HTML, or copy a site's download links. The same applies here, I never agreed to make sure that my browser functions a certain way or that I wouldn't do certain legal things with the information I found on a web page.
Regardless of whether or not it's stealing legally (I believe it's not) or ethically (Probably not), it is identical to stealing as far as Zap2it's business model is concerned. This doesn't mean you're going to get busted for scraping it without looking at the ads, nor does it mean that you should feel bad about it. All it means is Zap2it becomes more likely to go out of business every time you go around its ads. This is all the parent was saying (on this point, anyway). Don't expect Zap2it to last forever if you use it without seeing its ads.
Maybe the solution is to make the scraper fake a click-through on the ads every once in a while, so that the advertisers still pay them...'course, then you're screwing the advertisers, but there are more of them, and they probably have more money.
This is a self-referential sig
That analogy only works if I agreed to buy a frig that I only get to use the left half of. In that case, yes it is like Tivo. If I agreed to the whole frig then your analogy is wrong. When I bought the DirecTivo, I bought a device that would hold 30 hours of programming. I still have that 30 hours, even with their star ads, since the ads don't take up any of the space I use to record my shows. If I had bought a device with a 30gig HD and they took 2gigs from me THEN we might have a problem, but I still have everything that was advertised for the unit.
I'm all for the star ads, if I don't want to watch them I just DON'T SELECT THEM. And with the revenue from the ads, Tivo gets to stay in business longer. Win-win.