ReplayTV 4000 Series Shares TV Over Net 142
REden writes " ReplayTV announces their ReplayTV 4000 Series networkable PVR. Features include video sharing between LAN attached Replays, sending a show to another Replay over the internet, and automatic commercial skip. Prices start at $700 for a 40 hour unit and max out at $2000 for a 320 hour unit. ReplayTV guide service included. Units are scheduled to ship November 14th." 320 hours. I can't imagine holding on to that much TV - but space is cheap, so, eh, why not?
At that price... (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, there won't be a nifty display (unless you buy a LCD panel) but you won't be limited by their design.
I know it's been in the discussion lists earlier, but... an AMD box runs around 250$, add a 200$ capture/ MPEG compression card and you are up to 500 with a 40 gig HD. Thats alot of space... there is still programming issues, but... could be conquerd if the desire was there
Holy cow! (Score:3, Insightful)
Tivo has always been chicken to try anything like this, and it looks like it's going to bite 'em now that somebody else has the guts to do it. Why would you ever buy a unit now that didn't allow commercial skipping and content sharing?
It's probably too good to be true, though-- I imagine that this will be sued into oblivion before 20 units leave the stores. *sigh*
Re:320 hours = 320 gigabytes = $800 (Score:3, Insightful)
And the most aggressive compression rates, too! But being able to select the compression rate you want really is a big win for the consumer and manufacturer. The manufacturer doesn't get flamed that they've made a hard choice which either makes a poor quality video, or doesn't have enough recording space.
Get the cheap version. Hack on another disk.
Re: ReplayTV 4000 Series Announced (Score:2, Insightful)
Better still, can advertisers sue all those people going to the bathroom during commercials?
Ludicrous (Score:3, Insightful)
Things of this nature have been discussed for a long time, but eventually discarded as being impractical. Now, here it is in box form, and it's even more impractical than I would have ever imagined.
First of all, I spent $250 on my 20hr TiVo, and then an additional $300 in hard drives for a total of ~144 hours recording time in 120gig of storage. This combined total is CONSIDERABLY less than their 40hr unit, and comes with over 3x more storage time. This, alone, proves that it's not worth it. And $2000? For a PVR? Don't even get me started. I would MUCH rather buy a video card with TV in and the PVR-like services that video cards are being bundled with now. Then I could record to my heart's content... not that I've ever been able to accumulate 65hrs of content on my TiVo to date...
The networked video storage... this was never spoken of (out loud) because of the frowning of not only the TiVo sponsors, but the threat of lawsuits to a young company. People seem to have major issues when you distribute copies of programs with no visual loss between generations. At least someone else is here to take the fall that TiVo couldn't.
Skipping commercials was the other big problem. This has always been available via backdoors in TiVo (removed in 2.0.1, rumored to be back in 2.5), but again, never a mainstream feature because of the sponsor problems it would cause. I'm going to be real interested to find out how the television community reacts to these features, and hopefully ReplayTV can be the whipping boy to pave the way for TiVo's next software update.
This will be the only good thing to come out of ReplayTV, the fact that every legal team even eyeing TiVo in the past will all start looking Replay's way now... and if Replay can get away with these features without a problem, expect the apprehensive TiVo to have them Q1 next year. As for me, I couldn't even consider buying a PVR for $700. I almost never bought mine for $250, there's just NO WAY I could justify that much of an expense. Not when I could get at TiVo with better service (just a few less tricks up it's sleeve) for $199 nowadays.
Re:doesn't look like it will be mainstream (Score:2, Insightful)
If you just wanted to connect between two ReplayTVs to share the movies, couldn't you just use a crossover cable? That's relatively inexpensive. Or do you need the PC in order to manage the transfers?
REALLY, $700 isn't that bad. No, I'm serious! (Score:4, Insightful)
Shell out $700 for the low-end ReplayTV (40 hours), and it has the lifetime subscription at no charge. Ethernet is built in. You've got USEFUL networking apps that are SUPPORTED by the company. And you can download (via iChannels) content over the web so you've got a new content provider for non-mainstream media.
I think it is almost a no-brainer for advanced TiVo users to get one of these. I really hope it takes off. Or TiVo gets their act in gear.