ReplayTV DVR to Remove Features

KarlTheGhoul writes "D&M Holdings Inc. on Tuesday said its new ReplayTV digital television recorder will not include controversial features such as automatically skipping commercials and sharing shows via the Internet." This is a confirmation of our earlier story. Their new ad slogan will be "Costs More, Less Useful".

Comments

Slogan

[Zathrus]

Or maybe their new slogan should be "Trying Not To Go Bankrupt a Third Time!".

Those features got them sued into oblivion. They'll get anyone sued into oblivion frankly, because the media companies won't abide it, and you're going to have a hard time convincing a judge that it's not a copyright violation to share shows.

Removing the commercial skip bit is lame, since there are VCRs that do this already and they've never been attacked. But D&M is obviously hoping to get friendlier with the media companies, and this is another thing they hate.

That said, as best I can tell they just removed the two features that made Replay preferable to TiVo... and the rest of their software is inferior. So I don't quite get where they hope to position the brand at.

Re:Slogan

[aborchers]

and you're going to have a hard time convincing a judge that it's not a copyright violation to share shows

Because in most cases it is, perhaps?

I am an avowed enemy of the copyright cartel because of their heavy-handed tactics and their meddling with public policy and the tech industry. Nonetheless, if it weren't for people infringing their coprights, they wouldn't be wasting their time and money in these pursuits.

Every time I think about the fact that I don't have a legal DVD player for Linux or can't play my last (as in "most recent" as well as "final") major label CD purchase on my notebook computer, I want to pitch an entertainment industry copyright lawyer in the east river weighed down with the corpse of a "sharer"...

Lemme get this straight

[Brento]

They couldn't beat Tivo in the DVR game with more features and a lower price.

Now, Tivo's got the awesome Home Media Option out that lets you play MP3's on your Tivo, which Replay never had.

So now, best case scenario, they offer less features as Tivo at the same price? Or maybe a little lower?

What's the business model here again?

But the advertisers...

[Andorion]

However much I'd love to skip commercials, I can definitely see why advertisers and more importantly the networks are concerned (and you should be able to, too.) If fewer people watch the ads, the ads are worth less money - money which goes to producing shows. I'd be the first in line to sign a "Ray Romano gets paid too much" petition, but that's besides the point - without income from advertising (or with reduced income) I predict we'll either see show quality decline or cable costs go up. All it'll take is a few more years, when DVR comes built in every TV (or nearly everyone has a box.)

~Berj

Re:But the advertisers...

[KrispyKringle]

The concern most people have here, though, is not that they have a right not to view the ads; such a right is quite basic, as it goes hand-in-hand with your right not to view TV. This is quite different from a right, however, to view TV without the ads; when you accept an essentially free gift from the networks (however crappy the programming may be) you accept it on their terms; they would be well within their rights to say, "Don't like ads? Don't watch TV." As the ads become more pervasive, this is essentially what they are saying.

Rather, critics are bothered by the impact that a totally seperate industry can have on what sort of consumer electronics are even available to us with what capabilities. Were the TV networks to dislike this, they could force contractual agreements with consumers banning the use of these devices (purely hypothetically, of course). But instead they choose a less direct means of asserting their power, which translates to a means of, from a really sinister viewpoint, pacifying the natives.

Rather than openly tell us who's decision it was, the networks use threats and bribes to induce the hardware manufacturers into denying consumers an otherwise profitable and desirable product. This echos far too similarly to the practice of the RIAA of suing the pants off anyone who manufactures software or hardware that appears to threaten them ("Hey, baby, you don't need to sue me to get my pants off...") regardless of significant legitimate use.

This direction-through-indirection is merely annoying at best, but really a terrifying over-stepping of commercial bounds at worst. The government, who supposedly represents us all, is entrusted with the rights to deny us harmful or dangerous products. We trust that such an action is in our best interest, and that the reasons for such an action are the reasons stated up front--no underhanded manipulation is ever acceptible in a democracy--but we have given no such trust to any corporation. When a corporation who's business is televised entertainment, no less, makes for us a decision on what hardware is good and what is bad, it oversteps its commercial bounds.

Don't get so worked up.

[stanmann]

Doesn't automagically skip comercials doesn't mean you can't do a 15/30 second skip or jump forward. Just means that the box won't have the current feature which autodetects and skips commercials. Obviously, a compromise solution, but not earthshattering or skybreaking.

Re:Just wait

[KrispyKringle]

I don't know. People have been predicting the downfall of the mainstream media for a while for the same reasons. My feeling is that people never notice what is bad unless their is an alternative. People don't say "wow, our society could be so much better if...", they say "wow, our society isn't nearly as good as..." or, in this case, "wow, my TiVo doesn't do nearly as much as so-and-so's..."

The reason that peope have largely lashed back at Big Music is because there is a clear alternative which applies not just to consumers' sense of moral wrongitude, but their pocketbooks: Kazaa, Gnutella, or what-have-you. Until people see the alternative that they aren't supposed to know about, just the abstracted idea of not being able to do something that the technology does allow isn't going to catch the public's attention much.

Look at how people seem to feel about Big Music. Reading that ABC News article about the RIT student who settled with the RIAA by paying them $12,000, I was truly surprised at how openly critical of the RIAA the article seemed to be, at least, for another member of Big Media, so to speak. It's not that there's a whole open political movement, but rather that so many people, including, most likely, the ABC News correspondent, simply share music files and the RIAA has made anyone who shares files their enemy, quite publicly. They made the consumers the enemy, not the other way around.

So why will there be no immediate lash back at Big Media for restricting things like the TiVo? Because whats the illegal alternative? What free software are people going to download onto their box-top sets out of self-interest which will essentially make them unwitting enemies of Big Media? There is none; short of complicated and risky hardware-hacking, people won't be exposed to what they are missing.

If one TiVo-type product is available in the store with ad-skipping, and the other without, sure, there'll be a preference. But if people are never presented with the option? Then there will be no complaints. Just don't let them see what they're missing and no one is the wiser.

This Changes Nothing Important

[joel8x]

The internet sharing feature was crappy because it was slow and there was too much work involved to get something that you can get from Bit Torrent faster. The automatic commercial skip was flaky (I turned it off right away anyway) because you always ended up with snippets of show missing. As long as I have my 30 second skip button on my remote than I'm happy.

Re:I will buy a Tivo

[Noksagt]

Fair enough, though Tivo doesn't include either of these features! I guess that means they won't "take them away from you," but perhaps you won't be getting as much as you think you'll get.

Re:Failure ahead for Replay...

[mh_tang]

Go read their service agreement. It says that anyone who buys the service agrees that features may be added or removed at any time. And of course, buying the box without service gets you nothing more than a doorstop.

If Replay drops these features in the 5500 series, it will just create a very hot secondary/used market for the older 5000 models that still have Commercial Advance & Send Show features.

So in my opinion, there's the possibility that they not only remove these features from new units, but also retroactively from the older 4000 and 5000 series also. Potentially very bad news for people who have shelled out $250 for a lifetime subscription recently...

Re:Who needs it then?

[chmilar]

The nice thing about ReplayTV and Tivo is that they are "appliances". You buy it, take it home, plug it in, and it just works. It does it's one task very well, and you don't have to worry about it.

The "bonus" has turned out to be the "hack-ability" of both Replay and Tivo. You can easily upgrade to larger hard drives. The networked models allow shows to be copied to a computer.

A PC-based PVR will be even more flexible, but it is not yet a consumer-level "appliance".

PC Based DVR is alas, not the answer

[btempleton]

Many people have proposed doing DVRs with old standard PCs using ideally, open source software. Sounds great, more flexible, everything wonderful.

Until you look at the power. Check how much more power that always-on PC takes than a standalone box. Here in California, for example, every watt of 24/7 power costs $1.13 per year or more. So a 200 watt PC costs over $200 per year to run, $150 more than say, a 50 watt standalone device. Not to mention the damage to the environment.

In other words, you can pay for the standalone device pretty quickly, even if you had a "free" PC just stting around.

Now you could fix this problem if you could arrange for the PC to go into a sleep mode when it doesn't have anything to do, at the cost of waiting a little longer to come up when you turn it on to watch something with the remote. This requires the PC have in it a sleep mode with a clock which allows you to say, "Wake up in 3 hours". How many have this? How many have coded for it.

The standalone device can also do this easily.

And you lose the "always recording something to spare disk space" feature that people love about the Tivo.

Re:Come on Mikey.

[PhxBlue]

Is that really necessary from a (presumably) unbiased editor?

I know it's been asked before, but I may as well ask again: where have the editors on Slashdot said they're unbiased? Where is it stated as a requirement that Slashdot editors be unbiased? An editor who doesn't have a bias wouldn't be able to pick the good stories from the bad. . . Slashdot's editors are just more vocal about their biases than others. Where editors of larger newspapers have to be discreet, /. can place the bias out on the table for everyone to see - which really is doing its readers a favor, since you don't have to read as critically to find out the editorial spin here as you would on, say, FoxNews.

Think of it as open source bias, if that will help. :)

Re:Grounds for a lawsuit...

[afidel]

And THAT is why I will never own a Tivo or other device like it, I can never be sure that a week after I buy it all the things that made me buy the device will not be removed. With a normal consumer device it has a set featureset, I guess if I want a PVR it will have to be a home rolled one based on open data. Yes I realize how great things like season pass are but I have no assurance that they will be there after I purchase it.