[ExtractStream] Re: My Dangerous Idea - A technical question, not a legal question

[sharkey@a...]

> Because Tivo is a company I like and respect. I only try to change the
> business model of the companies I don't like (by not buying their product).
> They made a great product which happens to come with the big extra of a
> linux inside. I don't want to abuse it.

So I should boycott Tivo because I don't like their business model?

No, I like their product too much. And I don't dislike *them*, per se.
I just think they're aproaching things suboptimally.

> > No. They should expand their service to cover international areas.
> 
> No, why? There are lots of countries where it wouldn't make a business
> sense. [] It's not only listings. Hardware is different, too.

Hmm, I see your point. Ok, expanding to other areas is impractical.

But then, tell me, why should Tivo sell loss leader units to internationals
in the first place? What's wrong with saying "you have to be in North
America to buy a Tivo at a loss leader price (with a required service
contract); if you want to buy them internationally you'll have to pay full
price for the Tivo up front?" If Tivo has no intention of providing service
to these areas, it should have no interest in selling anything at all in
those parts of the world, and therefor not care if they have an apparent price
competitive with high end analog VCRs.

Anyway, it's just a fact of life that sometimes you have to buy things you
don't want because they come bundled with things you do want. Should Tivo
give me a discount because I don't use the Tivo's embedded modem or any
of their dial-up lines to get their guide data? How about the listings
for the shows I don't want to see? Can I get a refund on those, too?

> It has problems but unless service quality has dramatically dropped since I
> left the US it was very good.

It's pretty good, but there are still a few rough edges here or there. The
occasional listing that's just plain wrong.

It would be nice to be able to get up-to-the-minute listings for cases where
a sporting event runs late or something like that. That's a fairly advanced
feature, though.

> > Becuase the hardware doesn't lend itself to that. A VCR is a very limited
> 
> That you don't know for sure since you don't have the specs.

I'm willing to bet good money that my VCR doesn't contain a general purpose
programable CPU in it. Few companies go to the extent of filing off the
chip ID numbers of the parts they use. Commodity hardware is actually fairly
simple to duplicate if you have the facilities. There's rarely more than
a few custom chips in each device, and an engineer can usually guess what
they're supposed to do based on how they're connected to the other
components.

> > The Tivo is not in that class. It's a general purpose machine, with a
> 
> It has never been sold as such.

It's been sold as "TV your way.". My way involves a customizable general
purpose computer running Linux. Preferably Debian. :)

I should probably spend more time hacking than I spend shooting off my mouth
on mailing lists...

Eric