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.)"

Comments

Fallout.

[RatBastard]

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.

Nice but not the same

[Burdell]

AFAIK, the extended programming information that makes TiVo wish-lists and the "record first-runs only" so nice and useful (data like leading actors, guest stars, director(s), producer(s), original air date) is not available as part of the Guide+(TM) data. There would also be no suggestions except maybe for advertiser sponsored "suggestions".

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is going to make something competitive to an original TiVo series 1 with the original software; nice, but three years out-of-date.

Good News for Canadians...

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the Guide+ service is available in Canada, and the Tivo and Replay services aren't. (Unless you get satellite tv.)

You will all be screwed in the end.

[twitter]

Set top box swindle, news at 10! Wanna bet that this RCA service will use the guide channel to start advertising at you? Just as soon as enough people throw out their old VCRs and everyone has these little owned boxes on their TV, they will start feeding in advertisements to "support the guide service." Oh yeah, they WILL force you to watch the adverts before or even durring the program you wanted. Tivo will follow. It's just like the begining of cable TV - "Wow this new cable thing is cool, look at all the neat advert free programing here." Now look at it, $50/month for programing that's got more ads in it than network had in the 70s and the cool programing was squashed or moved to pay per view.

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.