RCA PVR Will Use Free Guide+ Program Guide

Mark Leighton Fisher writes "RCA has announced (among other CES goodies) a PVR/DVD player for this year that uses the free GUIDE Plus+ program guide rather than requiring an oncoming program guide contract. Once we bring the price down (yes, I work there) I may break down and get one, as I don't like the program guide fee required on current PVRs. (This may be the first no-program guide-fee commercial PVR.)"

This is great except...

[Nanite]

RCA is notorious for making crappy products. (My apologies to the poster.) I worked at radio shack and one of the first thing I noticed was how shoddy all of the RCA products were. A lot of returns on these items, especially the DVD players. Also, an RCA Lyra player I once had was a total piece of crap. I've learned my lesson about buying stuff from them.

About PVR Guide Charges

[Tony]

Tivo charges for their guide because they are providing a service. They sell their PVR for almost no profit whatsoever; unlike RCA, they have no other source of income to keep their PVR afloat until the PVR market takes off.

I don't mind supporting Tivo with a monthly charge, as long as I get service for my money. The program guide itself is worth the cost, and the convenience of Tivo is well worth the initial $200 outlay.

All-in-all, I figure if I can spend $12/month to support my Earth And Beyond habit, I can shell out $10/month for Tivo.

Just my $.02. Different people place different values on different things, so YMMV (your money may vary).

Re:Fallout. Not quite.

[Anonymous Coward]

Tivo doesn't make their pvr. They designed it, but actually subsidize other mfr's to make them for sale.

Tivo makes their money only on subscriptions.

This *could* put Tivo out of business. I can only hope that this at least makes them rethink their position on selling, effectively, advertising space on their customer's pvrs. (I'm referring to Tivo's policy of taking money to record programs and push them on the customer, with the customer being unable to delete them for 7 days.)

Re:No guide fee pvr

[Anonymous Coward]

that's nice...for people who use dishnetwork anyway. This is a genralized device.

Re:Fallout. Not quite.

[dissy]

> (I'm referring to Tivo's policy of taking money to
> record programs and push them on the customer, with
> the customer being unable to delete them for 7
> days.)

Heh, you mean that star menu option at the very very bottom of the menu? The one with the big star next to it so you can see if its there and not even glance in its area to read it if so?

Yes, those shows that only take up space on the root disk where it doesnt use a single bit from the volume the video is recorded to are so bad for me.

I know, lets boycott!

Sick of hearing this whining.

[SlashChick]

"I don't like the program guide fee required on current PVRs."

You know, this subject comes up every time an article featuring the TiVo is posted, and every time someone gets "+5, Insightful" for whining about the TiVo monthly fee.

My TiVo monthly fee is $4.95. Yes, less than five dollars a month. That's cheaper than the burrito I ate for lunch today! For everything that TiVo gives me, $5 is chump change. Plus, you can do yearly and/or lifetime subscriptions. It's also lumped in with my DirecTV bill, so I don't get a separate "TiVo bill" that I have to worry about paying. What is the big deal?

I get 500+ channels plus HBO, local channels, and TiVo for less than $60 a month. Digital cable would give me the same thing without TiVo for $85/month. You want value? Buy a DirecTV+TiVo. But please, stop whining about the subscription. Every damn TiVo owner in the world will tell you that the $4.95 is money well-spent on a TiVo.

The only people I hear complaining are people who think the TiVo is a glorified VCR. The TiVo is not a VCR with a monthly fee! It is a totally different way to watch TV. It frees you from cheesy "primetime" TV. I told my TiVo to tape every Steve Martin movie that was on, regardless of any channel it was on. Every once in a while I turn the TiVo on to find a Steve Martin movie recorded and waiting for me to watch! I can order and record Pay-Per-View with one click. I have completely foregone Blockbuster (and I say "Good Riddance!") Five dollars a month is worth it to watch every Steve Martin classic, get rid of video store late fees, and give up on crappy primetime TV. (Hmm, the Simpsons was on at 6PM... I think I'll just watch that at 9PM instead of whatever is on now!)

I do not work at TiVo. I do not work at DirecTV. I am, however, a satisfied customer of both. (Oh, and has your cable company lowered your monthly cable bill this year? DirecTV lowered my monthly bill TWICE in 2002. What more can I ask for?)

Who pays $600 to save $13 per month?

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets see. On one hand I have a brand name product with a reputation of not putting out the greatest quality product (RCA) on the other I have the leader of the PVR pack (TiVo).

RCA expects an MSRP of $600 for this product.

TiVo charges $150 for a 60 hour unit right now (see http://www.tivo.com)

RCA doesn't charge a fee for guide info.

TiVo charges $13/mo, or you can get a lifetime subscription for $250.

With that price difference it would take 3 years before you broke even on the RCA purchase. And if you bought the TiVo lifetime subscription you'd have $200 with which to buy TiVo's new Media Center software as well as a nice region free DVD player.

Or you could just buy the Toshiba DVD/TiVo device that was also announced at CES.

Sorry, but RCA sucks and you can have my TiVo when you pry it from my cold dead fingers.

I bought one for xmas

[slithytove]

and I'd just like to provide some info for others thinking about getting one themselves. I haven't personally used a Tivo or Replay so I can't really say whats best first hand, but I read lots of reviews before deciding on the RCA Scenium.
I mostly chose it for two reasons. It is a DVD player in addition to a PVR, which is great if you don't already have one as with me. I have no complaints about its DVD playing functionality whatsoever.
The other reason is, as the article points out, that it doesnt require a channel guide subscription. I didn't want to add another monthly bill to my family's life, nor pay a lifetime (of the unit) fee when the companies' lives may be even shorter than the average electronic appliance. My family pays the local cable service about ten bucks a month to have nice reception of local stations plus TNT, CSPAN and the other junk they throw in. Thus our situation as far as channels go, may be unusual, but it is an issue. The guide is flaky! When told we don't have cable it gets quite a few broadcast stations that we dont receive and associates some of the ones we do with the incorrect channels. When told we have cable it only gets the listings for TNT and the Food network consistently correct, though there was one day, since christmas that the listings seemed pretty complete across the board. I havent put a whole lot of time into figuring it out since you only get the new listing after leaving the unit off overnight, but I'm pretty sure we're hosed as far as the guide goes. That sucks, but it would be OK if the thing were reliable for doing scheduled recordings ala a vcr. No such luck! Instead of recording the scheduled show it sometimes (maybe 30%) goes to the menu and says "an error has occured". Maybe these are simple software problems that will go away with the next revision, but guess what!? the firmware is not updatable.

Re:Fallout? Not likely.

[frovingslosh]

At $600 it makes no sense, one could buy a TiVo and a "lifetime" subscription for less, and hope that the "lifetime" is more than a year or so. However, the monthly fee is certainly a reason that many including myself would not but a TiVo. Like others I hope that RCA will realize they have to drop the price of the PVR to be competitive, or that someone else like Apex will get into the market and undercut RCA. It's nice to see the subscription model broken, even if the product isn't reasonably priced yet.

Oh, goody! So tell me...

[SlashChick]

..."it does irk me that the service ... is ... the stuff you can get on line for free..."

Great! Let me know where I can go to a website and see every Steve Martin movie that is coming up in the next two weeks, with specific channel numbers, dates, and times.

And which website was it where I could go and click on MOVIES, and then type in "Steve Martin", and have it record all of those movies automatically?

That is why I pay TiVo $4.95 a month.

Monthly fee

[LazyBoy]

I don't like the program guide fee required on current PVRs.

I hate recurring fees too. That's why I bought a lifetime subscription and considered it part of the price of the box. Simple, yes?

And the total is probably about the same or less than the price of the RCA box.

Re:Unfortunately, not a long term solution

[CaptainSuperBoy]

RCA's Guide Plus has nothing to do with XMLTV, it's a service they've been offering for years. I believe it's exclusive to RCA and it pulls TV guide data off the air. I'm not sure of the quality of the listings or the service's reliability.

About XMLTV: Zap2it makes their listings freely accessible. As far as I'm concerned there's no contract where I agreed to view their ads as well as their content. They're free to implement technical measures to prevent people from scraping their listings, but until then I see nothing wrong with it. The one thing that concerns me is the bandwidth, I wasn't aware that the XMLTV grabber gets hundreds of pages. I might not want to put that much load on their servers.

Let's not get it in our heads that this is stealing, though. Anti-leech has the same philosophy, they consider it theft if you block a site's popups, view a site's HTML, or copy a site's download links. The same applies here, I never agreed to make sure that my browser functions a certain way or that I wouldn't do certain legal things with the information I found on a web page.

Re:Sick of hearing this whining.

[nolife]

You know, this subject comes up every time an article featuring the TiVo is posted, and every time someone gets "+5, Insightful" for whining about the TiVo monthly fee.

Yeah, and the same amount or TiVo lovers try to downplay or put down every other PVR as if they are threatened by them personally or afraid to admit the the technology is getting more common and the earlier TiVo's might someday be made obsolete by a newer product.

You start your post with "whining about the TiVo monthly fee" and "That's cheaper than the burrito I ate for lunch" as if cost means nothing to you and then follow it up with three paragraphs of money figures talking about how much money you save with the your current setup as if money does matter to you?

Oh yeah, every advantage you gave about the TiVo can be had with ANY PVR, maybe even ones from RCA with no monthly fee..

Mod me away as everyone knows that the non bandwagon followers always seem to be marked as trolls..

Still, Thanks, but No Thanks

[core plexus]

I must be missing something. All this hoopla over a few TV shows? I've had cable and satellite, and what I learned was that I was paying for more crap, not better crap. I was intrigued at first by the Tivo, et. al., but then I realized there's only a couple of hours of decent programming per week, and new movies I can rent on DVD for $1.00 at a place just a few blocks from my house, and hey, I work on a computer all day, and when I get off it's better for me to go outside and run around with the dogs, or go out on a date.

I also realize that everyone buying these are bringing the cost down, but as long as there are 150 channels of crap like "Just Shoot Me" available, I don't want it if it's $1.00

Personal Strap-On Aircraft for Auction on eBay [xnewswire.com]

Re:Sick of hearing this whining.

[uradu]

> My TiVo monthly fee is $4.95

First, mine is $12.95. That's several burritos in your currency. I wish I could make do with DirecTivo, but I can't until I get network over DirecTV.

Second, any one single service that you pay a monthly fee for isn't much by itself, and might very well be worth it. What is a big problem is that the TiVo fee is very endemic of the direction marketing seems to be moving. Everyone wants a piece of your monthly budget. Not a one-time lump sum, because once they have that and have given you their product, that's the last they're likely to get from you. No, they want to have an intimate relationship with your wallet, so that--amongst other things--they can readjust periodically how much their product is worth to you, AFTER they've tied you in. First you pay a monthly fee for the phone. Then the cell phone. Then the cable/satellite. Then the ISP. Then the TiVo. Then the NetFlix. Soon the music you listen to, then the software you use, then the washing machine/dryer/oven/coffee maker/fridge/handshake-from-the-friendly-neighborh ood-hand-shaker. Everyone would like to get out of the retail business and into the SERVICE business. Just look at IBM: if it were for some of their decision makers, they'd throw the entire hardware business (which after all too often results in one-time sales) out the window and switch entirely over to "services" that they can bill you regularly for.

That is what I hate about the TiVo business model. It's funny how large numbers are made up of many little numbers.

Re:Also on the page

[MrEd]

and liberals

What? What the hell do liberals have to do with this? Manufacturers and the media I can see, but liberals?

You live in the country that has a Conservative government that wants to create Total information Awareness while issuing press releases that read like a cheap Tom Clancy cover - "We have received threats... from undetermined location and an undetermined source..." etc etc. If that isn't capitalizing on September 11th and fostering a climate of fear I don't know what is.

Re:Sick of hearing this whining.

[BadlandZ]

The only people I hear complaining are people who think the TiVo is a glorified VCR. I've tried to tell people too... That's TiVo's biggest downfall, everyone that has used one loves it, everyone that hasn't used one doesn't understand what it really is and does. The best analogy I can come up with is;

A TiVo is as much a VCR as a spreadsheet is a calculator. Sure they both do calculations, but they are WORLDS apart in how they work.

No analogy is perfect, and the best I can play this one out is... The TiVo will do sooo much more than a VCR, but won't do long term storage (Spreadsheets do way more than a calculator, but require a computer to use them). It sort of falls apart there, but at least people understand "recording" is to "calculating" and just getting the answer doesn't always mean my $5 generic one is as good as your fancy high tech thingie...

Re:About PVR Guide Charges

[Anonymous Coward]

Will you stop repeating this brainwashed Tivo fanatic's mantra, please. The program guide itself is NOT worth the cost. You can get it on the net for free. It does NOT cost 12/month to repackage free data into a proprietary format.

Not a fee for guide data

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Tivo and Replay do not charge montly fees for guide data. Once upon a time they did, but any new units become boat anchors without either the lifetime or montly payments. The reason they have additional fees is pure marketing and it works two ways:

1) Paying only half price up front is easier for consumers to stomach.
2) Cost of inventory is signficantly reduced for merchants who carry the products.

#2 is the more significant reason - it was prohibitively expensive for merchants to stock ReplayTV's so they stopped until Replay figured out that halving the inventory cost made it feasible to get themselves sold at retail again. It is only with the 4500 and the 5000 where Replay changed this policy that they were able to get BestBuy and CircuitCity to start carrying their product again. The fact that the 4000 was direct-purchase (and later drop-shipped from Amazon) wasn't because Replay wanted to be "elite" they just couldn't convince any of the b&m merchants to carry the inventory.

Re:Unfortunately, not a long term solution

[mberman]

Regardless of whether or not it's stealing legally (I believe it's not) or ethically (Probably not), it is identical to stealing as far as Zap2it's business model is concerned. This doesn't mean you're going to get busted for scraping it without looking at the ads, nor does it mean that you should feel bad about it. All it means is Zap2it becomes more likely to go out of business every time you go around its ads. This is all the parent was saying (on this point, anyway). Don't expect Zap2it to last forever if you use it without seeing its ads.

Maybe the solution is to make the scraper fake a click-through on the ads every once in a while, so that the advertisers still pay them...'course, then you're screwing the advertisers, but there are more of them, and they probably have more money.

Re:Sick of hearing this whining.

[jchristopher]

What is the big deal?

It's not just this instance, it's the principle of the thing. Those of us who dislike Tivo's monthly fee because we see it as a stepping stone to "rent-an-appliance". I don't want my microwave to be replaced with some IP-based device that I have to pay a monthly bill for, just because it downloads menus automatically so they call it a "microwave service".

There isn't anything about Tivo that intrinsically makes it a service, other than the fact that they've chosen to sell it that way.

Simply the fact that my Tivo could become useless (even if I paid a 'lifetime' fee!) if Tivo, Inc. goes under is reason enough to steer clear of the whole thing.

As I've said before, I can buy a fully functional computer with a big hard drive, fast CPU, CD-burner, and TV in for $400. So how come Tivo can't make a profit selling Tivos for $300?

I think the answer is that they can. Up until now, they just haven't had to. Now that they have to compete that will change, which is great for consumers whether you love or hate Tivo Inc.

Re:Fallout. Not quite.

[cvas]

That analogy only works if I agreed to buy a frig that I only get to use the left half of. In that case, yes it is like Tivo. If I agreed to the whole frig then your analogy is wrong. When I bought the DirecTivo, I bought a device that would hold 30 hours of programming. I still have that 30 hours, even with their star ads, since the ads don't take up any of the space I use to record my shows. If I had bought a device with a 30gig HD and they took 2gigs from me THEN we might have a problem, but I still have everything that was advertised for the unit.

I'm all for the star ads, if I don't want to watch them I just DON'T SELECT THEM. And with the revenue from the ads, Tivo gets to stay in business longer. Win-win.

Re:GUIDE Plus+ *totally* sucks. Very inaccurate.

[Runny]

It is unfair to compare the version of Guide+ that comes with ATI's All-in-Wonder card to that which comes on an RCA TV.

I have BOTH Guide+ with my AIW card AND Guide+ with an RCA TV, and I can honestly say that the TV implementation is MUCH better than ATI's implementation. First of all, with the AIW Guide+, listings are only downloaded when you first get into the program guide so there's a delay while you wait for listings to be downloaded...plus it downloads puzzles and crap that nobody cares about. With the TV, you don't even have to know when listings are downloaded (middle of the night) - you just get them when you turn the TV on.

The RCA TV implementation is just much intelligent and easier to work with.