A couple of months ago, I was impressed by how well TiVo was courting consumers by lowering their price and marketing to busy people rather than to couch potatoes. But my opinion has changed greatly now that TiVo is going to allow pop-up ads while users are fast-forwarding through commercials. This makes TiVo look like a shill for the television industry and advertisers, and will likely anger many of their subscribers. It has certainly annoyed me. I think tech-savvy people will increasingly look towards creating their own open source versions of DVRs, like Freevo, while potential consumers will be turned off from subscribing. I hope TiVo remembers who it should be designing its services for and decides to rethink these popup ads.
Posted inopen source our digital future
Freevo is looking better and better
Freevo is good because of the total freedom & lack of recurring fees, but it is a major hassle to set up.
Right now, people are willing to pay $300 or so to Tivo to avoid the hassle, it will be interesting to see where the annoyance “tipping point” is where people decide to bail out & use a freevo instead.
MythTV is another popular free PVR project, many folks think it is more mature than freevo.
The hardest part about working with any of these is getting linux to talk to your hardware properly (particularly the TV capture card.)
Other than that, it’s smooth sailing. Mandrake even has prebuilt RPMs for both packages.