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

About PVR Guide Charges

[Tony]

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).

Who pays $600 to save $13 per month?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Unfortunately, not a long term solution

[nautical9]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but FreeGuide uses XMLTV to scrape its listings from various internet sites (Zap2It for North America). The problem is that Zap2It is very aware of this package, and although they've been a little forgiving of it so far, their stance is very much that it's a problem they're going to have to deal with (either legally or technically, such as constantly changing the HTML format to make scraping that much harder). I've had discussions about this with Jay Brodsky, their Director of Technology, since I was using XMLTV to redistribute my local listings on the web.

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.

Re:Unfortunately, not a long term solution

[CaptainSuperBoy]

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.

Guide+

[Danielle Gatton]

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.

Re:Sick of hearing this whining.

[aftk2]

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!

[snip]

Five dollars a month is worth it to watch every Steve Martin classic

[snip]

I do not work at TiVo. I do not work at DirecTV

Let me guess - you're Steve Martin.