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.'"

Comments

Bet it doesn't upload anything

[Dr_Barnowl]

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.

Amazon Cloud - Unlimited MP3 storage??? NOT!

[zidium]

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.