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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.)"
dishnetwork has em.
This could cause TiVo and ReplayTV to lower, or drop, the fees for their guide services. Eventually the manufacturing costs of TiVos and Replays will drop enough that they can sell in the $300.00 price range and make a profit. Maybe.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Hell, if that isn't the most obvious of the many "put paper thing on computer" patents.
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
Is RCA notorious for making crappy products or were they notorious for making crappy products? In your post you said, "worked", which I'm assuming is past tense. I'm no RCA proponent, however, I tend to think that one shouldn't overlook the fact that a company can change. It happens all the time as CEO's come and go. Hell, I think that RCA taking this path should be considered progress more than anything.
Past performance is not an indicator or future results...
To be fair though, I'm going to let others be the guinea pigs on this one, and I'll make my purchasing decision based on the subsequent fallout or lack thereof.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
My father has an RCA TV with Guide+, and the data is not very complete (there are quite a few channels on his cable that they don't list). It seems to be more focused on ads. Without more complete data, using Guide+ for a PVR will be frustrating (I've got one channel that Tribune and TiVo don't have full data for and that is highly annoying; not having any data for a number of channels would be a show-stopper for me).
Guide+ is something that RCA has pushed but pretty much everyone else seems to have ignored.
It sounds like RCA is going to make something competitive to an original TiVo series 1 with the original software; nice, but three years out-of-date.
Since the Guide+ service is available in Canada, and the Tivo and Replay services aren't. (Unless you get satellite tv.)
Then don't pay. You TiVo will still work to record live stuff, pause live stuff, etc... without the subscription.
You'll just end up with a list of dates, and that's it... And have to start playine each to know what it is. But hey, you didn't want to pay for the subscription to the guide, right? You don't want the extra features, right?
Once you've used one, you'll understand why it's worth it. Give a TiVo user the choice between a 34" HDTV, 200 channels and never the option to use a TiVo; OR... TiVo, just half the channels, and a smaller 27" normal TV. I'll bet over 70% (or more) would take the TiVo option.
Follow for a minute if you will, a computer is cool. Pull the hard drive out, and it's still fast... You can spend tons of money on it, and have a kick ass system. Save yourself $100 by not putting in a hard drive, and what do you have, money for a faster system or bigger monitor?
Now, you can boot from CD or floppy, you can save files on floppy, you can even burn CD's and open files. You can run a web browser or all your programs, all you have to do is switch disks every time you want to use something else. You can surf the net for hours never needing to use the hard drive.... But, do you REALLY want to live without a hard drive?
A home entertainment center without a TiVo is like a computer without a hard drive. If you haven't used one ever, only floppies and CDs (or video tapes), then you really just don't know what your missing....
Most of the big Cheabols/corporations already have stealth factories setup and ready to go in the North.
:) Remember what happened when East and West Germany came together. For the two Korea's, the gap between the two earning structures is even wider. Someone will have to foot the bill to equalize the two living standarda, and again, the large corps have already said they will fund it. Politics is in the way, so everyone waits.
There are many impediments to actually using any of the labor at this time. A prime example is the lack of infrastructure to move goods. Beyond manufacturing, there is also a ready source of low-cost programmers...we just can't get them on the payroll just yet.
The South Korean people are willing to open up, but with so much political sludge clogging the system, there's not much hope for any progress soon. It's a long and painful story
Remember, ReplayTV used to use as a selling point that their devices required no seperate payment for their guide data. However, the price of a ReplayTV was roughly equal to the price of a Tivo plus lifetime service... it wasn't that the guide data was free, it was included with the cost of the purchase. However, they learned that model didn't work very well, so they've now converted to the TiVo pricing model of selling a loss-leader unit and making back the money on service.
More or less, that's what this RCA device is setting up with too. Gemstar's Guide+ service isn't free as in speech. In fact it's not free at all. And when you look at the price tag, it's more or less going to line up right next to the Tivo with lifetime service. The only thing this device is trying to add to the mix is a DVD player... but do you think RCA is really going to let you copy that DVD to the HD? Nope, so there goes the only vaulable feature of a DVD and PVR in the same box.
So RCA's thinking they can use a business model that ReplayTV has already tried and retreated from? This is a product failure in the making.
Free TV guides just don't excite me somehow. Really free broadcasting, where anyone could put up their content and the user could chose anything anytime, that would be nice. That's what the internet was supposed to be.
OK, I'm having a bad year.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
There have been nice PVR's in Japan for a while now (at least a year) that also interface with your computer via USB1.1/2.0 (I'm sure there's a firewire version too and maybe a networked one) so you can copy and backup recorded shows as well as program it from your computer (not just on the TV). You can "explore" the contents of the PVR as you would your hard drive and copy, cut, paste, delete, rename at pretty much, will.
Maybe it's 'cuz of the DMCA, which doesn't exist elsewhere. (And they wonder why OUR economy is in the sh!ts)
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"You can't get blood from a turnip" - My dad back when I was a kid asking him for money.