ReplayTV Price Drop Bait-and-Switch 308
jkeyes writes "Last week on 12/17 DNNA (new parent company of Replay TV) decided to drop the Replay TV 5504 model down to $149, yet the boxes and website said that it came with three years free service. So immediately it appeared on deal sites like FatWallet with Replay telling people on the phone who called that yes all 5504 models include 3 years of service so immediately Circuit City & Amazon sold out. Then on the 12/22 DNNA released a press release annoucing the new price and claiming that the 5504 models NO LONGER have 3 years free with them and blamed the retailers for dropping the price too soon. Even though their own Customer Service Reps were saying when it first dropped that you got 3 years free. Also to add to the issue the actual devices have giant green stickers on them saying Three Years Free AND a paper inside telling you this. Replay went on to say that if you had a problem with this or your replay was deactivated to just return it to the retailer you purchased it from."
The egregious part of this.. (Score:5, Informative)
Then it took them a week before they put out clarifying press releases, and some stores continue to sell boxes with service-included stickers that DNNA won't likely honor. DNNA can blame the retailers all they want, but they're the ones deactivating boxes that contain their promises of included service. This as about as classic a bait-and-switch as there is.
Re:They stick by their promise (Score:4, Informative)
Legally, if they sell you a box and 3 years of a subscription service, and then fail to deliver, you are entitled to, at a minimum, a refund of the cost of the box and the fair market value of three years of the service, regardless of what you actually paid for the setup. This is the benefit of your bargain. Basic contracts law.
If the business is still alive, you might even be entitled to specific performance of the contract, if there was no reasonable alternative to their service. I assume TiVO is a reasonable alternative.
Re:They stick by their promise (Score:5, Informative)
That is a bit of historical revisionism. Maybe TODAY the current ReplayTV is suckeke but it wasn't always that way. The Replay 4000 units were shipping with functional ethernet almost a year before Tivo did the same. They also included automagic commercial detection and skip on playback - which works very well on "bright" shows and decently on "dark" shows (like buffy, for example). They also supported show-sharing across the interent to other R4000 owners, something Tivo (and Replay's current management) are way too big pussies to ever consider. Local network extraction of the mpeg files is also quite easy on the R4000 units and probably the R5000 too, I haven't checked. You could even do streaming playback on your PC direct from the replay with a player like videolan (vlc). Very handy for those of us with projectors on their PC's who want, for quality reasons, a full digital path to the screen.
Tivo has always had a more novice-friendly interface and they've got up on a lot, but not all, of the above features. But at the time, the R4000 was WAY ahead of the Tivo. Plus, no one has ever had to worry that their ReplayTV will think they are gay.
This is yet another reason why... (Score:4, Informative)
Fatwallet Thread (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/messageview.php?c
Davak
CC stores got it right... (Score:4, Informative)
Those who bought from 11/17 to 12/16 appear to be the big winners... it look like their 110% price protection claims are going to be valid.
Re:I brought one of these recently: Skip this prod (Score:5, Informative)
I also have a Replay TV. I'm on my 3rd unit, as the first two went kaput and had to be RMAd. Customer service during this time was a mixed bag, some reps were great, others did not appear to be native speakers of English and I could only understand every other word they spoke.
However, now that I've got a working box I'm pretty happy with it. Never had any problem with dl'ing the channel guide. And with its "sharing" feature and client software that others have written, you can send shows off to your PC for storage (or I think even burning to VCD, though I've never tried that).
Re:I brought one of these recently: Skip this prod (Score:5, Informative)
I own one of each. I recently upgraded my 4-year-old TiVo to a 120GB HD (30 hours at top quality; 145 hours at low quality) and love it again. My old HD was one of the ones with seek-timing problems, so there were hiccups in video and audio output and the menus ran really slow (I maintain it was a timing-design flaw and the drives were fine; TiVo maintained it was bad drives, but they still sold repairs using newer drives with much tighter timing specs rather than just non-bad versions of the same drives...) Anyway. I got the new drive (dirt cheap from http://www.weaknees.com) with TiVo SW preloaded, had my machine booting within 10 minutes (no, really) of cracking the case, and didn't lose a nonce of my lifetime service. Zero video or audio glitches, and menus are 5-10X faster.
The TiVo Channel guide is far easier to use for surfing.
The TiVo will step single frames both forward and backward; for no good reason, the ReplayTV will not.
ReplayTV's scheduling and playback-menu software is slightly more featurous, and allows you to listen to the currently output program (live or recorded), unlike TiVo's, which requires you to escape to a silent menu system to browse or make changes. Both have backgrounded audio and video in live-schedule surfing. Otherwise, ReplayTV's menuing is a bit more tedious and fragile feeling than TiVo's.
My ReplayTV has automatic commercial-skip, but it can be confused by non-go-to-commercial fades in the program near the commercial segments. So you lose the first or last few seconds of some scenes. For shows like that, I revert to using the "skip-forward" button that skips 30 seconds and is slightly quicker to deal with commercials than the TiVo method of triple-FF and hit the play button when you see the show return.
Tivo's play button backs up to an estimate of the end of the commercials coming out of double and triple FF modes. And it's surprising how good it is at guessing your reaction time within a second, so the triple-FF method is effective.
ReplayTV sometimes locks up completely if it gets stuck dialing home. That might have been a break-in problem, as it hasn't happened since the first couple of days I owned it.
In general, TiVo seems to be the more mature, better designed system. And now that I've fixed my HW problems, it feels like I have a brand new one. If I'd done that before getting a ReplayTV, I'd have got a second TiVo instead. Mea guinea piggus.
Oh. And the TiVo with the new HD is absolutely silent. No more disk-whirr in the living room. No fan noise. Scary "is it on" silence. The dolts at ReplayTV used a fan with a stepper motor (I think) and it sounds like they actually use it to keep the fan speed low. Dumb. Rumbles all night long. Not noticeable during the daytime, but the human ear is capable of 6-7 orders of magnitude of sensitivity increase depending on ambient noise, and if you're susceptible to insomnia, it's a stressor. I'm thinking of ripping it out and cooling the thing with a bucket of ice.
One last thing: ReplayTVs can be networked to send recorded shows from unit to unit; I understand that's supposed to be available on newer TiVos. I have no opinion of its value.
Re:old style? (Score:3, Informative)
Poor manufacturing, but still far superior to Tivo (Score:4, Informative)
Once you get past that, the ReplayTV itself is FAR superior to Tivo. Automatic Commercial Skip actually works 95% of the time, and using DV Archive, I am able to download any recorded show over my home network to my mac to burn to DVD. It's just awesome. Their interface is far superior as well...I like how you can organize the shows by category...and they are not displayed by date recorded. That's one thing I HATE about the Tivo...you have to scroll around looking for shows that you recorded a while ago. With ReplayTV, you can find it instantly. Plus you have a buttont to skip 30-seconds without a hack, unlike Tivo series I...and as far as I know Series 2 machines can't do this. Actually, you can fast forward as far as you'd like by hitting a number first and the the skip button. It's little things like that that make the difference to me.
Tivo is the AOL of PVR's, imho. ReplayTV decided not to bend-over for the networks, which cost them money in legal fees...which definitely hurt them. The only thing Tivo is better at is marketing.
Re:TiVo on Bresnan (Score:2, Informative)
They are still being sold with 3yrs Service (Score:5, Informative)
Number of sites around the web are still selling Replay's with 3 years service. My advice - buy one + if Replay don't live up to their deal take them to small claims court. You'll easily win + there are no lawyer fees. (Actually Replay won't even show up for the case so it'll take all of 30 seconds for you to get the judgement). How to collect: Invoice them with the court documents or (if you want to be really nasty) stick a collection agency on them -- it'll cost you anything up to 50% of the court award, but the satisfaction will be pure bliss. Enjoy!
Re:I brought one of these recently: Skip this prod (Score:5, Informative)
Follow these steps and your tivo's "->|" button becomes 30 second skip:
Select
Play
Select
3
0
Select
It will at least get rid of this source of annoyance.
P.S. Tivo Rocks!
Re:Replay TV is Amazing, in spite of marketing idi (Score:3, Informative)
KnoppMyth (Score:2, Informative)
Has to be installed, but get a WinTV-Go, add a HD to a decent box, add TV-out vid card or VGA converter (seems to be the preferred method, TV out usually looks like hell) and it looks like you are ready to roll.
Disclaimer--- DLed ISO last night, made sure it booted etc, building "fresh" box now.
Just posting FYI, as I can actually be "on topic" for a change.
Re:Poor manufacturing, but still far superior to T (Score:3, Informative)
Automatic Commercial Skip... meh. DVArchive... I admit it would be nice to have something that simple, but I can hack my Series 1 TiVo and add show recording and so much more, so I'm not concerned about it. The 30-second skip isn't really a hack, it's more like a cheat code, and I'm pretty sure that Series 2 does have it.
One thing about ReplayTV I'm unsure of.. On a TiVo you have a complete list of all your Season Passes (shows you want every episode of) and Wishlists (wildcard searches that let you search by name, actor, director, etc.), and can put them in a list according to their priority. You can also go through the entire list of shows it will record (in a list format, not on the TV guide) and see what it will record, as well as get a list of what it won't (and didn't) record and why. If at any point you see something that's not to your taste, you can cancel/enable recording and the TiVo automatically re-adjusts all the recordings. What conflict resolution methods does ReplayTV have? I've heard they're inferior, but I haven't had it explained to me very well.
ReplayTV is great for DIYers (Score:3, Informative)
The best feature of the ReplayTV 4k and 5k units (aside from commercial skip, which only works intermittently these days) is the built-in 10/100 ethernet. I can run DVArchive on my win2K box, export all of my shows (Simpsons, Mr. Bean, Stargate SG-1) to my hard drive, edit them with VirtualDub, and burn em to VCD with TMPEnc. ReplayTVs record shows in MPEG2, at D1(?) resolution - 720x480 at high and medium quality, I think low quality is half D1 - I'm not sure, since I never record anything at low quality. High quality shows are recorded with 48khz audio, requiring downsampling before you reencode to VCD.
Bottom line, if you're comfortable disassembling consumer electronics and re-imaging hard drives using the ReplayTV Upgrade patch, you should be fine. Many "dead" units can be brought back to life by re-imaging the hard drive - the premise being that somehow the on-board OS got corrupted. For privacy advocates, buy a used 40xx unit (as I did), as these are pre-activated, so you don't have to provide any information. If you're not comfortable messing around with the innards of a $400+ machine, and taking the risk of frying both it, and your computer (if you need to re-image, you have to hook up the replacement drive to your computer), then don't get a ReplayTV.
If you're a super-uber geek, then you can try putting together a MythTV box (next on my list of stuff to do, after I build a MAME cabinet - I think I'll put the MythTV box into the MAME cabinet...)
Last tip - BACK UP YOUR REPLAYTV BOX. If ever you need a disk image for your box, and ReplayTV goes under, you'll be SOL unless you've got a current, clean (stable) backup.
Replay's steadily decreasing functionality (Score:4, Informative)
As for what Replay is doing with their "free" offer, it appears to violate the Federal Trade Commission Guidelines for use of the word "Free" [ftc.gov]. These are quite specific.
when the purchaser is told that an article is ``Free'' to him if another article is purchased, the word ``Free'' indicates that he is paying nothing for that article and no more than the regular price for the other. Thus, a purchaser has a right to believe that the merchant will not directly and immediately recover, in whole or in part, the cost of the free merchandise or service by marking up the price of the article which must be purchased, by the substitution of inferior merchandise or service, or otherwise.
That's clear enough. It's binding on the supplier as well as the retailer; the supplier can't pass the buck here.
California also requires this: (Business and Professions Code 17509). [ca.gov]
-
Any advertisement, including any advertisement over the
Internet, soliciting the purchase or lease of a product or service,
or any combination thereof, that requires, as a condition of sale,
the purchase or lease of a different product or service, or any
combination thereof, shall conspicuously disclose in the
advertisement the price of all those products or services.
That's clear enough.Re:Hmm... (Score:3, Informative)
Forget that.
Everyone who bought one of those needs to file a criminal complaint with the Attorney General of their state for consumer fraud.
If they get enough of those, they will deal with them.
Re:This is why you roll your own PVR. (Score:3, Informative)
I prefer having a whisper-silent TiVo in my living room than a noisy PC. Getting noise-free PC parts ups the price considerably.
Also, you're always in danger of your program guide information being ripped out from under you with MythTV, since there is no legit free source of program guide listings. Last I heard, they were still ripping them off from websites.
Re:I brought one of these recently: Skip this prod (Score:2, Informative)
In response to a post about the 30 second skip remote function replacing the skip-to-the-end button, I wanted to point out that you can have both features (mostly) at the same time.
If you've done the "select, play, select, 3, 0, select" thing, then when you press the ->| button, it advances the play position by 30 seconds, but if you're scanning forward (fast forward, at any speed) and hit the ->| it will skip ahead by 15 minutes. So, FF, then stab ->| four times and you're at the end of the current recording (60 minutes ahead, anyway).
And in response to the post about the TiVo clipping the start and end of shows, I think I can say that its clear you don't have a DirecTiVo that syncs its internal clock with the time of day data in the satellite feed. If it ever misses the start or end, then its almost certainly (always, in my experience) due to the network programming being late.
This easy to check too, btw. You can have the TiVo display on the screen in the lower right corner its internal clock, as well as the position in the current recording that's being played. With that display on, you can easily watch what time the TiVo thinks it is and see when that coincides with the red "recording" LED turning on. To enable that time display use: select, play, select, 9, select. Do it again to turn off the display. (As always, its best to enter these remote codes while you're watching a show on disk (not live TV) so the TiVo wont try to change the channel while you're entering those numbers on the remote!
And one more regarding the TiVo not single-frame stepping backwards: In my experience, if you pause and them immediately hit the "step backwards" button, the TiVo will jump to the first I-frame that immediately precedes the current play position (which is usually not what you want). But, I've found that if you hit pause, then wait about 2 seconds, then hit the back key that it will then start stepping backwards one frame at time.
And finally, a plug for DirecTiVo. I love the fact that my recordings are never recompressed and are stored in a (largely) unaltered form from the way that they are received from the satellite. Having no generational loss is just great -- there is never a reason to watch live TV with this setup in my opinion. (also, it was trivial to install an 802.11 wifi card, web server, ftp server, bigger disks, etc...)