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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.
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.
"But if it is free, who do I sue if they get the wrong time for Will and Grace?"
Hell, if that isn't the most obvious of the many "put paper thing on computer" patents.
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
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.
> (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.
If you use the TiVo to record your favorite show on channel X and it moves to a new time or there is a new showing this week or it's an extra long episode this week you change NOTHING on the TiVo. It's all automatic. With the Guide Plus you will have to manage and monitor these changes yourself. I pay a bit each month to have someone else worry about this. I can't believe that people complain about paying less than the price of going out to eat for a guide and features that save you so much hassle and time.
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.
The RCA PVR is $599 according to the article, and you can already get a TiVo or a Replay box with a lifetime-of-the-unit pre-paid program guide subscription for that kind of money. The RCA box only provides 40 hours of recording time, which isn't all that great either. You can get a 60 hour TiVo with lifetime guide subscription for $550.
The new feature is that the RCA box is also a DVD recorder, which may justify the extra cost for some buyers. But making a 40 hr PVR for $600 up front with no per-month free is nothing new.
(I was the third employee of Replay, which was originally Pacific Digital Media and has since been acquired by Sonic Blue.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Since the Guide+ service is available in Canada, and the Tivo and Replay services aren't. (Unless you get satellite tv.)
Korea is too expensive. Taiwan, maybe...China for sure. They don't even make microwaves in Korea any longer...that has all just been moved to China. Korea's labor and infrastructure costs are simply too high. My company is keeping R & D and marketing here, but everything else has gone or will go overseas.
I contend that if the statement was translated by Apex's localisation team, it would read more like "The RCA drive under is vast inside the LYRA Audio/Video Jukebox 100,000 where there is a possibility the first 200 of only being visible engages image is an admirable possibility."
Y2K Compliant since the late 1890s
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.
...you could just buy 3-4 cheap VCRs and set the time to record your shows. That would get you 18-20 hours of record time.
On a related note, I am going to get rid of my computer and replace it with an infinitely long strip of paper. My frame rates will suffer, but I will save a lot of electricity.
My local police department will also be replacing their firearms with rocks.
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.
DirecTV lowered my monthly bill TWICE in 2002. What more can I ask for?
tv that stays on when it rains?
seriously - i had directv for two years, the dish was mounted on a 6x6 pine post sunk 4ft onto concrete (barn beam), with all the mounting bolts tightened till the metal was distorted, and the reciever would still lose the satellite lock if the winds were gusting more than 30kts. i live on the ocean, so that's a bigger problem than it sounds. dense cloud cover, that made for some interesting jaggies...and fugeddaboutit in the rain. this with a signal booster on ~75ft of cable no less! i'm happy with digital cable - i get almost as many channels as dTV, really everything except the sports package, the same image and sound quality, and my tv stays on 24x7! even in the rain!
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley