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.)"

No guide fee pvr

[missing000]

dishnetwork has em.

Fallout.

[RatBastard]

This could cause TiVo and ReplayTV to lower, or drop, the fees for their guide services. Eventually the manufacturing costs of TiVos and Replays will drop enough that they can sell in the $300.00 price range and make a profit. Maybe.

question - TV guide patent

[wfmcwalter]

If memory serves, isn't one of the reasons a full "on screen" TV guide presently costs $s is that the publishers of TV guide hold a US patent on all such EPGs ?

Hell, if that isn't the most obvious of the many "put paper thing on computer" patents.

In other PVR news....

[Anonymous Coward]

FCC Chairman Michael "Deregulator" Powell got a TiVo, for Xmas, and christened it God's Machine [sfgate.com]. He also said he'd like to share recordings with his other TV's and his sister. Perhaps this is good news for those of us who are worried about broadcast flags, etc. that are coming with digital TV adoption?

Fallout? Not likely.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fallout? I hardly think so. RCA is charging $600 for this device while TiVo charges $150 for a 60 hour Series 2 TiVo. I hardly think TiVo will stop charging their monthly fee just because someone comes out with a non-subscription model that costs 4 times as much.

Re:This is great except...

[bergeron76]

Is RCA notorious for making crappy products or were they notorious for making crappy products? In your post you said, "worked", which I'm assuming is past tense. I'm no RCA proponent, however, I tend to think that one shouldn't overlook the fact that a company can change. It happens all the time as CEO's come and go. Hell, I think that RCA taking this path should be considered progress more than anything.

Past performance is not an indicator or future results...

To be fair though, I'm going to let others be the guinea pigs on this one, and I'll make my purchasing decision based on the subsequent fallout or lack thereof.

Nice but not the same

[Burdell]

AFAIK, the extended programming information that makes TiVo wish-lists and the "record first-runs only" so nice and useful (data like leading actors, guest stars, director(s), producer(s), original air date) is not available as part of the Guide+(TM) data. There would also be no suggestions except maybe for advertiser sponsored "suggestions".

My father has an RCA TV with Guide+, and the data is not very complete (there are quite a few channels on his cable that they don't list). It seems to be more focused on ads. Without more complete data, using Guide+ for a PVR will be frustrating (I've got one channel that Tribune and TiVo don't have full data for and that is highly annoying; not having any data for a number of channels would be a show-stopper for me).

Guide+ is something that RCA has pushed but pretty much everyone else seems to have ignored.

It sounds like RCA is going to make something competitive to an original TiVo series 1 with the original software; nice, but three years out-of-date.

Good News for Canadians...

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the Guide+ service is available in Canada, and the Tivo and Replay services aren't. (Unless you get satellite tv.)

GUIDE Plus+ *totally* sucks. Very inaccurate.

[Viewsonic]

I have Guide Plus+ for my ATI TV Tuner card, and simply put, it sucks. A *lot*. Compared to my Tivo, this guide data is so off, it isn't funny. Doesn't have nearly any descriptions or anything.

You get what you pay for. Want to record that Simpsons episode and get half of Jerry Springer instead? Guide Plus+ will make it happen!

No joke.

Re:Sick of hearing this whining.

[BadlandZ]

What if I don't want those features?

Then don't pay. You TiVo will still work to record live stuff, pause live stuff, etc... without the subscription.

You'll just end up with a list of dates, and that's it... And have to start playine each to know what it is. But hey, you didn't want to pay for the subscription to the guide, right? You don't want the extra features, right?

Once you've used one, you'll understand why it's worth it. Give a TiVo user the choice between a 34" HDTV, 200 channels and never the option to use a TiVo; OR... TiVo, just half the channels, and a smaller 27" normal TV. I'll bet over 70% (or more) would take the TiVo option.

Follow for a minute if you will, a computer is cool. Pull the hard drive out, and it's still fast... You can spend tons of money on it, and have a kick ass system. Save yourself $100 by not putting in a hard drive, and what do you have, money for a faster system or bigger monitor?

Now, you can boot from CD or floppy, you can save files on floppy, you can even burn CD's and open files. You can run a web browser or all your programs, all you have to do is switch disks every time you want to use something else. You can surf the net for hours never needing to use the hard drive.... But, do you REALLY want to live without a hard drive?

A home entertainment center without a TiVo is like a computer without a hard drive. If you haven't used one ever, only floppies and CDs (or video tapes), then you really just don't know what your missing....

we'll get mod'd down for off-topic but oh well..:)

[djupedal]

Most of the big Cheabols/corporations already have stealth factories setup and ready to go in the North.

There are many impediments to actually using any of the labor at this time. A prime example is the lack of infrastructure to move goods. Beyond manufacturing, there is also a ready source of low-cost programmers...we just can't get them on the payroll just yet.

The South Korean people are willing to open up, but with so much political sludge clogging the system, there's not much hope for any progress soon. It's a long and painful story :) Remember what happened when East and West Germany came together. For the two Korea's, the gap between the two earning structures is even wider. Someone will have to foot the bill to equalize the two living standarda, and again, the large corps have already said they will fund it. Politics is in the way, so everyone waits.

Re:Fallout? Not likely.

[LostCluster]

Remember, ReplayTV used to use as a selling point that their devices required no seperate payment for their guide data. However, the price of a ReplayTV was roughly equal to the price of a Tivo plus lifetime service... it wasn't that the guide data was free, it was included with the cost of the purchase. However, they learned that model didn't work very well, so they've now converted to the TiVo pricing model of selling a loss-leader unit and making back the money on service.

More or less, that's what this RCA device is setting up with too. Gemstar's Guide+ service isn't free as in speech. In fact it's not free at all. And when you look at the price tag, it's more or less going to line up right next to the Tivo with lifetime service. The only thing this device is trying to add to the mix is a DVD player... but do you think RCA is really going to let you copy that DVD to the HD? Nope, so there goes the only vaulable feature of a DVD and PVR in the same box.

So RCA's thinking they can use a business model that ReplayTV has already tried and retreated from? This is a product failure in the making.

Re:This is great except...

[mkldev]

Still do make crappy products. I bought an RCA branded DSS dish (DirecTV) about six months ago, and man was it badly designed. Unlike the all-metal... I think Phillips... small dish that I started with, the RCA large dish was basically a giant piece of plastic.

Unfortunately, they designed the thing to be attached to the metal back with stove bolts, which promptly gouged out the square bottoms of the holes (resulting in the heads just sitting there spinning) long before I could get the nuts tightened down. I would have to have tightened them down another -inch- before they would have been tight....

I ended up sawing off the provided bolts with a hacksaw and replacing them with normal bolts, lock washers, and non-locking nuts just to get the thing put together.

And then there is their assertion that you should set the tilt and never be able to adjust it again. That would be fine except that the various manufacturers can't even agree on how to measure angle of tilt. Had I followed RCA's directions, I would not have been able to get a signal from both satellites. I'm so glad I realized their cluelessness before I used any more of their stupid lock nuts....

It took me less than thirty minutes to install my original Phillips dish, including aligning it. It took me three hours and almost $20 worth of additional parts and tools (hacksaw, etc.) to install my second.

Let's just say that I'll buy another RCA dish when they rip the hacksaw from my cold, dead fingers, and leave it at that.

They need to rip it from Guide+

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone needs to figure out the format for the magic Guide+ signal (it's transmitted over normal cable tv signals somewhere) and use that - it can't be changed without breaking anything that uses it.

The ATI TV cards use it, so it's possible to get it from a PC somehow.

You will all be screwed in the end.

[twitter]

Set top box swindle, news at 10! Wanna bet that this RCA service will use the guide channel to start advertising at you? Just as soon as enough people throw out their old VCRs and everyone has these little owned boxes on their TV, they will start feeding in advertisements to "support the guide service." Oh yeah, they WILL force you to watch the adverts before or even durring the program you wanted. Tivo will follow. It's just like the begining of cable TV - "Wow this new cable thing is cool, look at all the neat advert free programing here." Now look at it, $50/month for programing that's got more ads in it than network had in the 70s and the cool programing was squashed or moved to pay per view.

Free TV guides just don't excite me somehow. Really free broadcasting, where anyone could put up their content and the user could chose anything anytime, that would be nice. That's what the internet was supposed to be.

OK, I'm having a bad year.

Re: sick of this whining

[Ancil]

I don't want to pay ten bucks a month for the TV listings. That's not whining. It's me wanting to save ten bucks a month.

Notice to TiVo fanatics: Comparing prices between competing models isn't "whining". It's "capitalism".

I want to find something that offers the features of a TiVo, but I don't have to pay for every month. That doesn't make me "cheap", it just makes me a smart consumer.

More interesting stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

RCA is also releasing a TV that monitors NOAA weather broadcasts and will aleart the user when a warning is issued, even when the television part is off.

With the new RCA Alert Guard models, television viewers are assured of receiving the latest information on natural disasters threatening their area - such as hurricanes, tornados or floods - as well as nuclear power plant alerts, chemical spills and even threats to the national welfare in the form of terrorist attacks. Even while the consumer is sleeping (and electricity is available), the RCA Alert Guard TV can be set to sound a built-in chime or alarm when danger is imminent.

Kind of reminds me of this news item. [2600.com]

BTW, does anyone read posts by people who just don't like registration?

First, in the US maybe but not in the world.

[MoFoQ]

There have been nice PVR's in Japan for a while now (at least a year) that also interface with your computer via USB1.1/2.0 (I'm sure there's a firewire version too and maybe a networked one) so you can copy and backup recorded shows as well as program it from your computer (not just on the TV). You can "explore" the contents of the PVR as you would your hard drive and copy, cut, paste, delete, rename at pretty much, will.

Maybe it's 'cuz of the DMCA, which doesn't exist elsewhere. (And they wonder why OUR economy is in the sh!ts)


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"You can't get blood from a turnip" - My dad back when I was a kid asking him for money.