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Boxee TV's Unlimited Cloud-based DVR Holds Users Hostage To Monthly Fees
An anonymous reader writes "Boxee has announced the game-changing Boxee TV, offering live streaming TV via two on-board tuners and an industry-first 'No Limit' DVR service that allows users to record as much TV content as they want, and access it from virtually anywhere. The problem is that the unit, which records directly to the cloud, does not allow recording to a local drive, meaning users are stuck with Boxee for as long as they want to access their stored content — potentially hundreds or thousands of hours – to the tune of $14.99 per month until Boxee ups the ante. CEPro.com suggests, 'I suspect Boxee is offering unlimited storage to make users especially beholden to them. The more content you have, the less likely you are to drop the service.'"
With the exception of Tivo, I've yet to see any of these new DVR's I keep hearing about lately even mention if they work with cablecards or switched digital video. If not, what the hell would I buy one for?!? My cableco and all of the satellite networks encrypt pretty much ALL their channels now (and my cableco uses SDV extensively too). WTF good does a DVR do me if all I can get on it are a handful of over-the-air channels?
And as far as connecting to online services, big fucking deal. My Xbox, TV, and even blu-ray player already do that. And even if this wasn't a standard feature on pretty much everything sold today (pretty sure it will be built into my next refrigerator too), I could buy a Roku box for $60 that will do that.
Can someone please tell me what market these things are aimed at (or if any of them beside Tivo *do* actually support cablecards and SDV)?
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
I like how those of us who bought a first-gen Boxee Box got a shit firmware out of the box, a shit web browser, and a shit experience with the whole mess, and instead of addressing any of those issues in the last two years they said "fuck all y'all niggas," discontinued updates to a broken piece of shit, and then released a hostage-ware device to fuck their customers anew.
Michael Brutsch is a Linux programmer. Coincidence? I think not.
Natural evolution of cloud-based commerce. Nothing to see here.
That is: They record everything, and your 'Record' action is basically a bookmark.
Surely the redundancy is pointless.
I suppose one issue might be - your local community cable channels.
Most people have dreadful upload rates anyway ; the asymmetric connections we receive are very much tailored for us to be consumers, not servers.
I'll lay dollars to donuts that it doesn't upload what you record - they just have a master server which records *everything* and your Boxee just sets a row in a database that tells it what you asked it to record. This way they can offer "unlimited" storage - they just retain a single copy of each program that users record, and look to see whether they should offer it to you based on what you "recorded".
No doubt they hope this gets around the legal limitations that have been cropping up recently with other parties offering store-and-forward services.
Why do media distributors keep doing this? It doesn't even make any sense.
It's like a bad hack to adapt 20th century TV schedules into 21st century content distribution. Why not just get rid of the stupid schedules completely?
I don't even care about "owning" content, because I very rarely watch anything more than once, so I fail to see the point of storing a personal library of TV in the cloud. Give me something like Netflix over this any day.
Upload speeds and caps and this dont work that well.
How is this different than any other cloud storage provider, with the exception that the DVR content remains "at Boxee" and can't be copied?
This is just like any other subscription service, IMO. Why does everything have to be some damned sinister all the time?
The nice thing about TV shows is the fact that broadcasters often repeat them often and are available in other formats such as DVD's or online streaming services, so even if you were to cancel your service to Boxee the information isn't gone, just might be a slight time inconvenience if one wanted to watch it. Or one could just use a TV provider provided DVR box which records the digital stream directly to the box instead of to the "cloud", it just isn't "unlimited" .
However from personal experience a 500GB DVR box is more than enough (at least for SD programming). Also now being offered by TV providers is boxes with a lot more that 500GB are being offered now and can in some cases record up to 5 programs at once.
...recurring revenue better then one time revenue. News at 11!
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
After how they treated their boxeebox customers by sidelining a product that was still on the shelves yesterday?
I'm avoiding any product they produce like the bubonic plague and telling anyone who lends an ear to do the same.
look at itunes....
So they offer a service - unlimited Hard Drive space - and they charge you for it as long as you use it.
What exactly is the issue? If you don't like it, buy a PC with TV tuners and use your own hard drives.....
It forgets to mention why I'm supposed to be outraged, or upset, or concerned, or... feel anything at all about this.
Ok, so Boxee deletes your recording if you stop paying. So what? Who cares? Don't sign up if that bothers you.
Comment of the year
The strategy is brilliant as a way to lock people into your service for the long run. Especially when you consider that with de-dupe they are really only putting pointers to a given file in a database with your account. Like or not, this is the cloud doing what the cloud does best and is the way of the future.
If the device has to go through your own network, can't you just redirect the upload address to one of your own choosing?
> I suspect Boxee is offering unlimited storage to make users
> especially beholden to them. The more content you have, the
> less likely you are to drop the service.
Well, it works for governmemt, why shouldn't business adopt that business model?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Holding users hostage? Jesus, things are getting desperate in these tough economic times.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
OK,
About a year and a half ago, I received an offer to store unlimited numbers of MP3s on Amazon Cloud services. I was under the understanding that this would be good for the duration of my account, a perk of being an early adopter of Amazon Cloud Player.
Then last month, I got a nasty email saying that my "trial" was over, that I was 20 GB over the new limit (200 "songs") and that I would have to pay every month for the service to keep the songs.
That's why no one should sign up w/ Boxee assuming their unlimited offer will always be there. One day they're going to wake up and either suffer more money or lose content.
Slashdot Valentines Beta Massacre: iT WORKED! The boycotts killed Beta!!
Which is why I say "No thanks!" to yet another thing no one wanted in the first place. Netflix gets by with the monthly fee because it streams data from their servers. If I pay a monthly fee for it and XBox Live and this and that and this other thing and that other thing and and and and, it just goes on forever. Nickel and dime fees that are killing people in the US. You ever wonder how all the DOW and fortune 500 companies can be doing so well while unemployment is so high? Its because we're allowing them to continue making money while they have less responsibility for the product. They don't have to hire more people so they don't. They have spread vertically so far that the money from these little fees are enough to help when one of their products doesn't get enough profit. There is no need to expand production and hire new people because they can just charge more fees for this digital thing and wham bam problem solved. Thank you for reading this rant and now back to your regularly scheduled trolling.
buy the show, watch it as many times as you want, download it to mobile devices, no need to worry about data usage if you're not on unlimited data
In the UK (don't know about the rest of the world) we have Sky+.
Sky+ records to the hard drive in the device but encrypts the video. As soon as you stop paying them you lose access to everything you have recorded.
We had Uverse. Service was ok and the any room DVR is really nice but we cancelled because it was expensive and the primary consumer is my wife who was mostly watching OTA stuff anyway. Most of the cable only programming is crap reality shows anyway. So we put up an antenna and are recording using DVD recorders. It works but the DVD+RW's wear out after a few months and they are getting harder to find. And our DVD recorders only have SDTV tuners. And you can't watch something else while the recorder is recording. A Boxee sounds like it would work for my wife. She would especially like to be able to stream her recordings to her tablet. Sure I could do roll my own with a spare Linux box but I have better things to do and *I* don't want to be the support tech when something doesn't record right. Now if the Boxee plan also let use the cloud for data storage to back up our stuff, it would pay for itself.
It's all about framing. You say that, and I say "WTF good does cable/satellite TV do me, if I can't watch it on a DVR?"
I record OTA shows; that's about half my TV. The advertisers who pay to run ads during those shows, have some (though not all, I'll admit) of their ads seen. The advertisers who pay to run ads during shows that are only transmitted encrypted, are never seen because I watch all that stuff through ad-free torrents. (So if you have an ad to run, make sure you place your order with someone who can actually show your ad to people -- i.e. not cable or satellite channels.)
Cablecard is irrelevant, because no half-decent DVR will ever have the capacity to work with Cablecard. It's illegal and a contract violation to work with Cablecard while not sucking. Ergo, it's a negative bullet point on a DVR feature list, which tells everyone the DVR is crippled. Why would anyone say their product sucks?
If you are frustrated by the lack of tools that work with your cableco, there is an answer: cancel your subscription. Stop paying them. If they ever decide they want your money, they will step forward and promise a plaintext service. Then everyone (viewers, cablecos, advertisers) will win. For now, the time is not right, because you're still paying them. You lose, advertisers lose, and cableco wins.
Where there is a will, there is a way. However, I encourage everybody to drop boxee and send a clear signal that we want OPTIONS.
I noticed on Fred Wilsons blog today that the FCC endorsed "BoxeeTV" device has been announced - http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/10/boxee-tv.html This was sort of announced recently along with the FCC decision that cable tv providers no longer need to carry unencrypted cable http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/15/3506030/fcc-allows-basic-cable-encryption-protects-consumers-open-access (guess those washington lobbying efforts paid off), One point of note the FCC announcements indicated that cable providers only need to offer this for free for 2 years and then will be allowed to charge for this from then on http://www.slashgear.com/fcc-cuts-boxee-a-little-encryption-slack-but-not-forever-15251887/ , I cant find any information from Boxee about what these costs will be from the cable providers to make BoxeeTV work? I'm also curious about "storage in the cloud" and whether Boxee expects any patent challenges around this? eg would be a shame if an injunction strikes down the cloud portion functionality. http://blog.collins.net.pr/2012/10/boxeetv-announced.html
Boxee is just doing what Amazon does now with their Prime service. Prime offers you access to watch tons of TV and movies at no additional cost (beyond the cost of the Prime membership). You can queue up shows and watch them at your leisure. But if you cancel Prime...poof...there goes all your TV shows and movies in the queue. So you can only watch it for as long as your membership is active. Boxee is doing exactly the same thing.
Cloud services are for people that are dumb and/or too lazy to figure out how to do it for themselves. The appeal is that it's so easy. Just pay a few bucks a month and let the cloud company manage everything for you. Ok, so I can have access to my music and movie library from anywhere there is an internet connection. You can do the same thing with an OpenSSH connection to your home media server (for free) or by using a VPN service (some are free, some you pay for). To me, paying $15 a month...every month...forever...is not a very good deal for something I can do for free. But not everyone is technically inclined or has the time to figure it out so for them it's worth it. To each their own.
piratebay.se
all the same shows, no monthly payments. actually I lied, MORE shows.
unless the box from your cable company has multiple outputs for each tuner, you'll be limited to recording a single program at a time.
I think cable companies just want customers to pay to rent more boxes in order to record more simultaneous channels.
I use a Ceton InfiniTV 4 CableCARD tuner and SageTV (using SageDCT to control the tuner), and am able to record any program that's flagged Copy Freely, which in my area is all of the Extended Basic channels (which is all I want, anyways).
Not everybody lives in your area. I remember reading comments to previous Slashdot articles claiming that cable TV operators in some areas flag extended basic cable restrictively.
A few months back, DirectTV showed me that you don't need to have your DVR recording to the cloud in order to be denied access to your programs.
In June, I shut off my DirectTV satellite service for the summer. A couple of weeks later, I tried to watch a program that was recorded to the DVR earlier. The DirectTV device displayed a message informing that the content wasn't available because I was not subscribed to the service.
It wouldn't even display the list of recorded programs that were stored on the DVR, just the message screen stating that access was denied because the DirecTV service was not enabled. This was DirectTV denying access to the programs stored on the local hard drive of the DirectTV DVR that I owned (it was purchased, not leased).
Before this experience, I was also one of the those who believed that owning the device and having your content stored on a local drive is safer and gives you more control.
It's like a bad hack to adapt 20th century TV schedules into 21st century content distribution. Why not just get rid of the stupid schedules completely?
Three reasons:
I guess some people might want to record things but it's not like there isn't enough of it on all day every day, and then there's the internet where all the decent TV channels archive everything so you can watch it later anyway. I never record anything and never struggle to find something to watch. Paying money to record live TV seems like paying money for internet pr0n.
Korma: Good
No one likes having his or her arm twisted by some greedy asshole.
The technically astute will know about this Boxee behavior sooner, but when the word
spreads people will vote with their wallets, and their vote will be against Boxee.
Of course all this is not exactly a surprise if you do much thinking, but then most
people don't.
No company in business today wants you to own anything. They want to own it and give you a limited license to use it. Boxee is the latest to jump on the" I need to have a monthly income stream beyond one time selling hardware" so lets do it by not storing stuff locally but in our cloud where we can charge for it. I was very excited to read about this new box as I was looking for a DVR solution for just regular OTA content that I occasionally want to watch without having to have a monthly fee or a computer based solution. I just moved into the country and I got pissed off while reading about how I need to sign up for 2 years to get Satellite service and at the end I STILL dont own the equipment but they are leasing it to me. This is is for a combination of two reasons, 1) theft of service (having it in multiple locations at once) and 2) To stop the secondary market where people can have contractless service.
Additionally as others have mentioned, not everyone has these huge pipes to the Internet...for $70 a month I get a 2M down / 512k up DSL connection where I had a $40 15M down / 5M up connection in the city...
I played around with a Raspberry Pi running XBMC, but found it a bit laggy and the IR receiver dongle I had acted like a mouse rather than as arrow keys, making navigation painful.
Rather than buying a Pi, case, memory card, and new IR dongle, I ended up getting a Pivos XIOS DS. Running their pure XBMC firmware it works pretty well and is noticeably faster than the Pi.
Before some industrious programmer figures out the apis and the command sequences and make alternative access to the content available to all ?
Considering that many people pay a monthly fee to record shows on a very finite hard drive sitting under their TV, this is a step up.
They are just trying to avoid a repeat of the I-Openerdebacle, I assume.
http://osiris.978.org/~brianr/mirrors/www.i-opener-linux.net/
If you don't like their terms, don't use or pay for their service
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
If you don't want to buy this service, DON'T BUY IT.
Buy yourself an OTA Receiver and DVR platform and record it yourself.
News alert: Someone wants to charge for a service. They are obviously evil doers.
Agree completely. I actually have a Boxee Box and certainly won't go out and buy this. SInce I do have a capped Internet provider this offers me very little value. OTA/ATSC encrypted signals are okay I suppose, but not exactly a game changer.
I have a cable service and have a PVR.
Basically the Boxee folks thought long and hard to come up with some sort of subcription service. Since they have absolutely no leverage with content providers they decided to lock down this functionality to suit their financial goals rather than the interests of the users. Their argument that people are running out of space is a week one. If they're that keen, provide the cloud-storage as an ADD-ON.
This also explains why they never came out with DVR functionality for the USB-based tuner for the Boxee Box. They had this planned for ages.
I'm going to pass.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
Any cloud provider should allow exporting of any content that was put there at a lower monthly rate.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Quick, someone call the EU, a business is trying to provide a valuable service such that you keep paying them on an ongoing basis for that service!
Call the EU and Shut. Down. Everything.
If Boxee has 100 subscribers in New York and 30 want to DVR - Survivor - What stops them from being able to record it once and serving the episode to all 30 that want it? Or better yet allow someone in San Fransisco to request to record survivor and see it as all ready recorded from the EST station and watching that recording?
Sorry, I've got a Boxee Box currently, and the firmware is lagging very behind. With the apparent inability to keep the box up to date, I am far less inclined to get another Boxee. Considering Roku and/or AppleTV. (Or any other suggestions other than a full multimedia PC)
Drug Dealers work this way too. The first few times are free. It is a proven business model.
* Cable companies - HBO free for 6 months
* Online storage - first 5GB free
* Online backup - first 5GB free
* Netflix - watch anything you like, until your ISP limit is reached
* All you can eat buffet - good for 3 hrs only
* Unlimited data on your cell phone, but the bandwidth drops to 2G soon.
* Free smartphone, if you add 2 yrs to the contract.
* Google - unlimited email storage, just let us track you everywhere on the internet, let us read every email and every bit of content you create
Boxee is just trying to do the same thing, but they are being more honest about it. I think it will fail, but don't have any ill will for them.
I will not be a Boxee subscriber even though they are offering the service in my area. See, I can calculate that a HTPC, antenna and tuner card will pay for themselves in 1 yr or less when compared to a cable subscription. Boxee will take longer.
BTW, I receive 69 OTA digital channels just outside Atlanta using a $20 homebuilt DB4 antenna mounted in the attic. It is hardly the "few channels" like we recall from childhood. The limited basic cable subscription that I had before only provided 25 channels - half were religious or shopping crap.
Avoid drug dealers. They are not your friend.
"an industry-first 'No Limit' DVR service that allows users to record as much TV content as they want, and access it from virtually anywhere" pretty well describes Netflix, just with more television and less flexibility.
Holy shit! A company provides a service and expects you to pay for it!!! This is an outrage! I'm calling my Congressmen!!!
Obviously its a slow news day at Slashdot.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
You nailed it.
For crying out loud, it's TV shows.
What kind of pinhead is paying someone to store TV shows.
(It was a rhetorical question.)
No brain, no pain.
I live in Vancouver, British Columbia, and I get my TV & internet from the 'telephone' company (Telus, formerly BC Tel). The TV is IP-based and is decoded on Cisco Boxes running some variant of a Microsoft offering. My PVR content is recorded & stored on a local drive, but to play it back I need to have an internet connection (if the internet is down I can't watch live TV or play back recordings). This is part of the protection services built into the hardware to prevent me from copying off the recording content. The Telco and content providers are allowing me to time-shift, but not remove the content.
So what's new here? When you keep our data on someone else's server and then pay them for access to it, guess what you're doing?
I'm sure what I am saying now is has been repeated dozens of times above, but damn... obvious is obvious. The public needs to hear more about this issue.
Now my recording can be corrupted by slow upload bandwidth.
Boxee and Comcast made a deal to enable IPTV for their product(s). We dont know all the details of the deal but what if storage isnt on boxee servers but is instead stored out on comcast for comcast subscribers. http://broadcastengineering.com/blog/comcast-makes-encryption-deal-internet-tv-developer/
How is this different than the set top dvr my cable company provides? Other than unlimited storage? I can't download the programs from my box, and if I stop paying my monthly fee, I won't be able to access the bits on my box. So how is this different? By the way, except for a few small shows, if I can't catch up on stuff inside a month... well it isn't worth keeping around anyways. Cause I'm either never going to watch it, or there will be other ways to get the same show.
Yeah I take uploading video to the cloud over transfering them to my local hard drive any day of the week. I mean its so much faster, with less problems and I end up paying for it time and time again with a monthly service, who needs local storage, jeez!!
Yeah, and it sucks to be them; their cable operator is screwing them over.
What recourse do people whom it sucks to be have against the cable operator who is screwing them over?
But the point was that CableCARD CAN and IS a useful feature, without it being "illegal" or a "contract violation".
I will grant that it can be and is a useful feature for people who can afford to move away from a cable operator who is screwing them over.
Shucks that is going to choke the internet just to watch content.