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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.)"
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.
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.
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.