Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
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
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!!
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.
I was an enthusiastic user of Boxee in their early days and ran it on top of Ubuntu. But the basically gave the finger to the entire community. I also bought a Boxee Box as I thought it could be a cheap way to easily stream movies off my main XBMC box. It's not good for that, either. File scraping is a nightmare. They add nothing to XBMC and, as a matter of fact, take a lot of stuff out that makes XBMC terrific. For instance Boxee's file scraping isn't good for anything other than straight mainstream viewers. If you like anime then you're SOL. You can only use their scraper.
There is *nothing* out there even remotely close to the quality of regular XBMC. When they get their Android version perfected there is going to be a flood of cheap XBMC boxes base don Android that really will be high quality. Boxee is not the way to go.