ReplayTV to launch PVR software in 2006

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ReplayTV to launch PVR software in 2006

Pretty amazing news from the company that refuses to die: ReplayTV will be launching PVR software for the PC that will ship with Hauppauge TV cards next year.

It's interesting to see a full service, hardware/software company like ReplayTV move into a strictly software realm. I'm curious what it will do to their profitability -- you can only make so much money selling $50 software packages compared to selling $300 boxes, though of course it's a lot easier to focus solely on software. Partnering with Hauppauge is a great plan, as they are the leading seller of TV cards for the PC, so ReplayTV will have instant uptake among Home Theater PC builders. Time will tell if this is a good move for the future of ReplayTV.

by Matt Haughey December 19, 2005 in ReplayTV

Comments

This announcement leaves me a bit sad. I'm an avid ReplayTV user and supporter, so I hate to see this "end of an era." Maybe this transition will result in a new software update for all of the current ReplayTV owners.

Posted by: Bo at Dec 19, 2005 7:33:02 AM

Seem to me that it would be easier to make money selling software instead of hardware. Don't most of these hardware makers lose money on the boxes? Hard to do that with software, and the buy-in cost is much lower for consumers.

Posted by: dglynn at Dec 19, 2005 8:59:10 AM

I expect there will still be a monthly charge to use the service, which is really where the opportunity for profit is. Is this the case? ReplayTV and TiVO for that matter are essentially service companies rather than hardware companies. If they can get they can get into a bigger market with their service by offering a lower up front cost, then I would expect them to have a higher probability of success. As a replayTV user with a lifetime subscription, anything they do to keep the service running is a big win for me.

Posted by: chris at Dec 19, 2005 10:18:44 AM

This news must have been a blow to Snapstream after years of bundling Hauppauge TV cards with BTV. Maybe that's why Snapstream started bundling Dvico HD cards for their new (but not yet perfected) HDPVR feature.
Haven't ever used ReplayTV but it will be very difficult to convince people to subscribe when none of their new PVR software competition requires it.
I'm guessing Hauppauge may be involved somewhere in the restructuring of ReplayTV.

Posted by: dave at Dec 19, 2005 11:21:33 AM

There is more money in software and services than in hardware. RTV, and TiVo, are basically giving their hardware away now, taking a major loss, and making it up on subscriptions. There is a lower cost of manufacturing for software.

But I think this is going to be a hard fight for ReplayTV. While they'll be bundled with the cards, the tuner card market is much smaller than the CE market. And they have established competition. The ReplayTV name isn't well known in the general market since they've basically been out of the retail world for 2 years, and never had a huge presence to start with. On top of that, there is the 800 pound Gorilla in the form of Windows XP Media Center Edition, which has been squeezing the 3rd party DVR packages out of the market already. Many PC vendors are making MCE the standard load now - if you have MCE, why use 3rd party software?

Posted by: MegaZone at Dec 19, 2005 12:02:18 PM

Anybody remember SEGA?

Posted by: Lou Jacob at Dec 19, 2005 12:50:41 PM

I don’t know how long this is gonna last.

For the consumer who just wants a HTPC and will go to the store and buy one Microsoft Media Center edition will be coming preinstalled.

People buying tuner cards for the creation of a PVR with an existing system generally puts them in the realm of being moderately sophisticated consumers.

Why would they opt for a $50 package with subscription when an $80 package www.sagetv.com already exists and has no subscription fees?

Also Sage TV supports a lot of free aftermarket adons and has an active developer community creating these adons for a while. With sage TV you can get the basic package but then add OTA HD recording, Automatic commercial skip, a fully functional web interface (which actually lets you watch the shows via the web) etc.

Any educated consumer is going to know that SageTV can eat Replay’s lunch any day.

Posted by: Lee Burch at Dec 19, 2005 1:24:56 PM

replay may not charge for the epg info, also, it may be bundled with the card for free. nowhere did i read it would cost 50 dollars. hauppage may have paid replaytv for the deal. we do not know. hopefully they will add functionality and offer dual tuner.hd support. time will tell. as long as my existing replaytv's work, i am happy.

Posted by: neogeo at Dec 19, 2005 7:46:37 PM

I don't see how ReplayTV could charge a more than nominal service charge. The marginal cost of providing the TV listings and occassional software updates is essentially zero. The reason Replay and Tivo have been able to charge significant service charges is that they have needed to recover the costs of selling $300-$400 boxes for $50-$150 (after rebates) and they've had no competition for providing the service to their boxes and no competition giving away boxes without service charges. In the PC realm, Replay will have competition from other software vendors providing the listing service for free and cannot (unless Hauppauge is stupider than I think) prevent people from using other software.

This will still probably be more profitable than selling subsidized hardware in the hopes of recovering costs through service charges. Profits have been pretty rare for Replay and TiVo.

I wonder if they'll take advantage of faster CPUs to enable better compression. TiVo/Replay has much lower quality at their high quality 3 GB/hour setting than you can get on bittorrent from people who encode using xVid compression and get file sizes of 350 MB/hour. You can't get compression that good and compress on the fly, but with a decent PC processor, you should be able to do better than the 1-3 GB/hour that TiVo and Replay manage.

I agree this is a tiny market and I suspect that Hauppauge is paying Replay closer to $5 than $50 for the software. Replay's not going to make big bucks this way either. I'm a loyal user, but the only thing keeping Replay afloat is the fact that it gets subscription revenue for essentially no additional cost (no reason to fold). The easiest way for it to stop losing money is to stop selling hardware, stop working on the software, fire almost everyone and live off subscription revenue as a tiny and shinking company.

Posted by: dperrella at Dec 20, 2005 8:59:35 AM

Look for Apple to enter this market in the coming month(s) and take customers from both Tivo and Replay. I have been a Replay user for about two years now and I'm starting to really miss HD support and higher quality recording in general. As mentioned, 3 GB/Hr ought to give you much higher resolution and video quality. Apple has a lot of experience in this area.

Posted by: kipe at Dec 20, 2005 2:01:08 PM

"The marginal cost of providing the TV listings and occassional software updates is essentially zero."

Buh? Replay and TiVO pay regularly to theri service provider to the data they distribute. They have ongoing costs for the data center to deliver that data. Just because people CAN leech off of Data Direct dev accounts doen't mean a commercial operation can.

As to quality. People who upload to torrent sites usually source from HD or DVD, garbage-in, garbage out. MPEG2 can look just as good with the right hwardware and signal.

But you know what? None of it matters becuase Windows Media Center on Vista will support cable card. In my area Comcast is already simulcasting all their previously analog only content digitally. It looks good (except for SciFi, whcih is hosed on digital as on analog with crushed blacks and poor contrast). Tivo, Sage and Replay can offer all the analog only IR blasting STBs or software they want. It's yesterdays technology.

However, I am a huge REplay fan. (own two 5K units with comercial advance and lifetime sub) and I think their PVR software is the best, unlike TiVO it doesn't treat you like a drooling pre-schooler who can't tell time or read. I look forward to seeing waht they can do on the PC and I hope, that together with Hauppauge they can do Cable Card on the PC like MSFT is doing with Media Center.

Posted by: Ian at Dec 21, 2005 1:54:35 AM

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Posted by: L925YwmzGZ at Dec 21, 2005 11:03:13 PM

"you can only make so much money selling $50 software packages compared to selling $300 boxes"

What? That is lunacy. You are forgetting that the economics of the software business are very different from hardware. The manufacturing and distribution costs of each $300 box are likely in the $150-200 range, wheras once software is written, the incremental cost of selling one more copy is basically zero. That's why Microsoft has produced so many millionaires. Sure, the picture is complicated by support, advertising, etc, but the basic economics remain.

I'm surprised I have to explain this.

Posted by: mkb at Dec 27, 2005 10:57:49 PM

Thought I would pass this e-mail I received on.

I'd like to call your attention to H.R. 4569, the Digital Transition Content Security Act of 2005, which proves the point I've made many times over the years, that when it comes to technology, government doesn't really know what it is doing. H.R. 4569, which was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives on December 16th, is intended to protect the intellectual property rights of movie studios by MAKING ANALOG-TO-DIGITAL CONVERSION ILLEGAL.

I am not making this up.

Under the Act as proposed, manufacturers will have one year after passage to stop making devices that convert analog signals like music and video into digital forms unless those forms preserve some original Digital Rights Management technology present in presumably the pre-analog stage.

What this is about, then, isn't making it illegal to use a digital recorder to record from analog microphone. Heck, that would destroy the music industry. Congress's thinking (if we dare call it that -- I see no flashes of synapses firing) is that media are going digital more and more and the greatest opportunity for snatching content is during the actual performance when, for the sake of driving a screen or a speaker, the digital signal goes analog.

What's covered by this proposed law are things like TiVO and RePlay Digital Video Recorders, TV tuner cards for your PC, software intended to record audio or video streams, or just about any device or program you might use to actually implement that part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that says you have the right (though soon not the equipment) to backup or media-shift your own music and movies.

This is law-making at its worst. It isn't burning books, but very close to that since one could see how scanners, too, will be outlawed, making for some people the production of books more difficult. And of course it simply won't work. Since the act doesn't require destroying existing TV tuner cards, then the half dozen I own ought to be worth plenty on eBay. Same for every kind of DVR you can think of. And some people will still make their own devices, which won't be illegal as far as I can see, as long as they don't offer them for sale. We'll see TV tuner cards for sale minus a single resistor, thus turning them from products and into kits for, well, something. Could it be a TV tuner? Nah.

And of course the bill completely ignores the fact that the Internet is a global network. Expect our friends in Canada to create a robust industry in grabbing signals from U.S. radio and TV stations and feeding them back across the border, just as we can expect the French, who this week pretty much took all restrictions off peer-to-peer file sharing, to provide us lots of free music.

This is political posturing and special interest pandering at best and is unlikely to do much to protect intellectual property rights while doing quite a bit to alienate folks who actually understand the breathtaking inanity of what's being proposed.

Which sadly reminds me of a political fundraising breakfast years ago at the Yale Club in New York City. Bill Bradley was trying to run for President and raising money as fast as he could with events like this. Comedian Bill Cosby was there in the audience. "Bill, you are a comic, tell us a joke," asked Bradley.

"Senator, you are a politician, first tell us a lie," said Cos

I am sending an email to my Congressional Representative, John Shadegg – his email is sean.noble@mail.house.gov

You can find your rep here:

http://www.house.gov - you have to type in your full 9 digit zip, you can find it here: http://zip4.usps.com/zip4/welcome.jsp

This is my email:

I am absolutely opposed to the passage of the Digital Transition Content Security Act of 2005. The media conversion of any content that I have legally acquired should be completely up to the consumer.

I am in the Computer Services industry. We have been very successful helping companies enhance their business process using these enabling technologies. I believe this bill is an attempt to protect the recording and movie industry from piracy, with the very harmful side effect of crippling the legitimate uses of these conversion technologies.

It is unfortunate that there are individuals and organizations who choose to abuse these technologies, but I don’t believe that this warrants the penalty it imposes on lawful implementations.

Please vote against this bill. I look forward to viewing your record on this legislation.

Posted by: Terri at Dec 29, 2005 7:50:26 AM

For those who think that it's "cheap" to provide TV scheduling services, try to find it available on the internet. I've been planning a wireless handheld/notebook app that would utilize that service, and haven't been able to find one yet!

Posted by: Bill Rapoza at Jan 5, 2006 2:41:32 PM

Why sell hardware when the hardware in their systems in already in most homes? MS is a software company and we don't need to state how much money they make. The key will be if their software allows commercial skip and access to poopli (Replays video sharing site). I for one think its a smart move. Hardware has no margin and you rely on the subscriptions to make the money anyway. I love my Replay and am very interested in the software since I want to add a media computer in my living room, why not make it a Replay PVR media computer.

Posted by: chad_small at Jan 7, 2006 1:04:57 AM

RE: Terri, you need to check out GB-PVR. It is a free PVR software that comes with free TV program listing. I think they get their info from titantv.com
Talking about TV scheduling info, choosing your source is a key factor for the success of your PVR product. It is sad to see the giant Sony scoring negative points in AV magazine reviews for choosing the cumbersome TV Guide channel information on their most recent HD DVRs: DHG-HDD250/500. Not that it is the only bad move that they are making lately...

On another note, I hope that the RTV software once installed on a PC would recognize any ReplayTV found on the network - kind of like what is happens when an Xbox 360 finds a Windows MC on the network - and would allow me to choose the 'Record on a networked RTV' option from my living room RTV. Now that is something that would convince me to buy the software.

RE: MKB thatnks for your post. I just emailed my rep.

Posted by: Jairus at Jan 8, 2006 10:26:22 AM

not bad i like that

Posted by: rizwan ali at Jan 22, 2006 9:53:31 AM