TiVo giveaway has lump of coal for Comcast

TalkBack 8 of 19:

Next »

« Previous

• Thread View
• Flat View

What do you get for $13/month?

A bit over a year ago I started using SnapStream's Personal Video Station (now called BeyondTV). This is software that you put on a PC with a tuner/encoder card to grow your own Digital Video Recorder. For a one time purchase price, you get the software, and free downloads of guide information for the lifetime of the product, which, being upgradeable software, is likely to be somewhat longer than the lifetime of any DVR hardware unit. Of course, this is only as good as the lifetime of the SnapStream company, but so far so good on that count. Even without SnapStream's own guide listings, BeyondTV can integrate with free guide listings services.

So, what do you get for the subscription fees (whether monthly or lifetime) with TiVo hardware? I think you get the warm happy glow of supporting yet another sell-at-a-loss make-real-money-from-dues consumer electronics model.

Of course, SnapStream BeyondTV, MS WindowsXP Media Center Edition, and other similar software on-your-own-PC-hardware options for building your own DVR are not for the average home user, so there will be a place for TiVo &etc no matter how broken their consumer electronic marketing model and how much of a rip-off their subscription fees...

Posted by: libove@...   Posted on: 12/17/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

Alert moderator to an offensive message

Subscribe to this discussion via Email or RSS

SponsoredWhite Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads

• Virtualization: Architectural Considerations And Other Evaluation Criteria VMware Of the many approaches to x86 systems virtualization available in the ... Download Now
• Why Isn't Server Virtualization Saving Us More? A Few Small Changes May Dramatically Increase Your Efficiency VMware Companies have rapidly adopted server virtualization over the past few ... Download Now
• Open Standards Technologies Provide the Ingredients for Delivering Security Across the Papa Gino's Enterprise Dell Papa Gino's Holdings Corporation founded by the entrepreneur operates one ... Download Now