Will You be Joining Schedules Direct?

[zehd]

...unless they are in 2 completely different viewing areas.

Having two wives and families is hard enough, but he's tinkering with 2 pvrs too. There's a guy that can manage his time!

That almost sounds like me. Two wives, Two PVRs... How DO we find the time...?

[-Oz-]

Hahaha, nice...

Yea, they're in two different viewing areas. Completely different cities. One is for my family and one is for me (i'm in college, almost done). But yea, I do a lot of remote connecting to fix things with the other one. Recently it just committed suicide (which was interesting). Turned out it was a bad stick of RAM so I actually had to physically go fix it Was a good way to test 1.0.8. Also got the new dualtv drivers, they are SOOOO much better.

But yea, thats my problem, multiple viewing areas. So for me it'd be $10/mo

[bdgbill]

Hahaha, nice...

Yea, they're in two different viewing areas. Completely different cities.

But yea, thats my problem, multiple viewing areas. So for me it'd be $10/mo

Not neccesarily. I wouldn't be surprised if they had thought that out. Maybe you will be able to have all the lineups you want but will be limited to a certain amount of downloads per day / per month etc.

Remember...This service was built by people who have been building and using PVR's for a long time. Zap2it was giving away some data to keep the scrapers off of their commercial website. They had no motivation to really put a lot of thought or effort into the service.

[-Oz-]

Not neccesarily. I wouldn't be surprised if they had thought that out. Maybe you will be able to have all the lineups you want but will be limited to a certain amount of downloads per day / per month etc.

Remember...This service was built by people who have been building and using PVR's for a long time. Zap2it was giving away some data to keep the scrapers off of their commercial website. They had no motivation to really put a lot of thought or effort into the service.

If that is the case then I'll probably at least try it out for the 3 mo. period.

[jerry430]

I'll definitely sign up for the first round. However, I'll wait to see what happens to the price.

[fbachofner]

Yet another way to separate us from our money . . . in this case for something that's already there for free.

Don't get me wrong, I applaud Schedules Direct for the effort, but why are people so willing to pay for yet another recurring service fee? [Indeed, I don't even really understand people paying for BASIC cable (enhanced versions might make sense if you "need" premium content such as that provided by HBO) when you can get a superior digital signal for free over the airwaves.]

The service may only be about $0.17 per day at the current rate, but by the end of the year it is still $60. Wouldn't you much rather give that to Sub (or a plugin developer) for his (their) work on GBPVR?!

As far as listings go, in the US and much of Europe, Guide+ provides 7 days of listings data for FREE that are provisioned over the air (or over your cable system) in the vertical blanking interval. [This works great on an RCA TV I own, and I am aware of a number of PC TV-tuner cards that have the requisite chips as well.]

I just wish I were a decent programmer and could write a plugin that pulled the Guide+ data into GBPVR! 7 days' data is more than enough to manually resolve conflicts -- especially when one has EWA to manage GBPVR from remote locations

Meanwhile, I wish the tactic the somewhat influential people behind Schedule Direct had taken would have been to petition Yahoo! or (especially) TitanTV to provide XML feeds of their data to registered users of one of those services.

I bet TitanTV would be particularly interested in this -- anything that keeps their registered user numbers up is good for them. For continued access to XML listings, TitanTV could have compelled users to visit a web page just as Zap2It Labs did.

TitanTV is also already used to provisioning XML (as memory serves, take a look at their .tvpi files), so this would probably be a trivial system enhancement for them.

[sub]

Meanwhile, I wish the tactic the somewhat influential people behind Schedule Direct had taken would have been to petition Yahoo! or (especially) TitanTV to provide XML feeds of their data to registered users of one of those services.

I bet TitanTV would be particularly interested in this -- anything that keeps their registered user numbers up is good for them. For continued access to XML listings, TitanTV could have compelled users to visit a web page just as Zap2It Labs did.

They did approach these companies, and many others (incl TitanTV, Yahoo!, Google, ReplayTV, Snapstream, etc). Some were not at all interested. Some wanted to charge way too much, which would have resulted much higher costs for the user than the current Schedules Direct service. Google was the best of the bunch - even though they werent able to help long term, or with actual listings, they did donate some signficant startup costs.

[fbachofner]

Hi Sub:

Thanks so much for your insight into this issue.

They did approach these companies, and many others (incl TitanTV, Yahoo!, Google, ReplayTV, Snapstream, etc). Some were not at all interested. Some wanted to charge way too much, which would have resulted much higher costs for the user than the current Schedules Direct service. Google was the best of the bunch - even though they werent able to help long term, or with actual listings, they did donate some signficant startup costs.

I have to say I am a little astonished. I think these listing services are being very shortsighted -- there is a huge opportunity to woo "power" TV users who frequently inspire technology uptake in others . . .

Do you know if Gist or Guide+ (now Gemstar) were contacted? It seems these would be good providers to approach. As I recall, one of these is the "authoritative source" for US TV listing info and it actually provides basically all of the listings information one sees among the other sources discussed above.

Perhaps this "parent" would have an interest in growing the PVR market through easy to access listings?

[Jim_]

It looks like this poll needs to have another option added to it.

$30.00 a year for a paid epg service that supports the entire freeware / non-commercial use community, not just a select few.

http://ctpvr.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1682#1682

[whurlston]

LOL, That was actually a program that I was considering exporting data from like my Y! and MCE apps. Unfortunately, no OTA again.

Edit: remember that Schedule Direct's goal is $20/year.