BeyondTV 5.0

[ZetaVu]

"but I think they do need to work on ways to get a little more money out of us consumers." Well, I disagree with Dave. I've always ben of the mind of fair pay for a fair product. BTV sells for a price and that price includes guide updates and keeping it up to date (new capture cards, update with OS changes, etc). Additional tweaks are perks, I agree, but the basics of keeping the product functional are part of why the price is where it is, which is pretty high considering there are free alternatives as you've mentioned.

Now, if SS wanted to do a subscription service, that's a different story and definitely a different price point. Then we're talking about $10-20/year (packaging in free 1 yr plans with hardware cards, etc) which would get you guide, updated programs, etc. I would not be interested or buy that kind of product, I prefer to pay once and be done.

What I do agree with is what SS was doing with added features, if they make a new (revolution vs evolution) feature, then charge to add that. They did this with beyond media, dvd plugin, in fact 4.0 (which gave us hi def). When they make a major change to the platform or add something big, then incrementally charge. The important thing is that when 4.0 came out, SS continued to support 3.x, meaning you had the option to stay where you were. I prefer what they did with the dvd plugin, since then you could opt out of the upgrade and the base product is still supported.

Sadly, that is where they are going to miss the opportunity with btv 5.0. Change the viewscape to alow plugins, and they've opened up not only new revenue streams (selling plugins to current users) but also increase overall sales by becoming competitive against alternative htpcs.

As I see it SS consumer needs to get more sales (new users) without losing their existing user base, which is what they've been doing. There are a lot of people with btv licenses who are using other programs, so even though SS got paid once for that idle license (which might find its way to ebay, thus negating a new sale) they are not getting the potential for add on sales.

Remember when BM came out? The community was writing plugins like crazy. Well, that is all dead now, no excitement, very little loyalty base. They have managed to alienate the most dedicated of users quite effectively.

So, all that said, I am planning to stick with btv as long as it keeps doing what its supposed to do, since I see no reason to walk away from the security of the system (guide updates, support) for a free system or pay again for a possibly better system when I'm happy with btv. If I was forced to pay again for btv to keep it running or updated, well that's a game changer, now I'm motivated to evaluate the competition, better to pay a little more upfront than to throw good money after bad because SS decides to go a different direction than the consumer end.

[pnwuser]

[quote=ajw;295896]Number 1 on my list is closed-captioning.

I don't give a damn about anything else.

I'm at the age where the tv gets louder and louder (for everyone else) and I still can't hear it. Combine that with loss-of-hearing of highs and lows - (I have trouble distinguishing between fffff and sssss for example) - and I'm hosed.

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I am not against fixing closed captioning, but until they do....

Have you considered using headphones? Then you could have it as loud as you want. You don't mention if you are using hearing aids. If you are not then perhaps you could get hearing aids. I have permanent hearing loss so I always use hearing aids and if the TV is too low I turn my aids up.

Just a though....

[sean_snider]

Well said Zeta. . . i agree 100% with your input.

I'll glady pay one time till the cows come home for 1 feature at a time.
I won't pay for a subscription service (if i wanted that I'd just use the Cable Co).

I so desperately want all the things SageTV offers, with BeyondTVs polish. . . and then some. . .
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Now, if Snapstream hurting for revenue, the above plan should help. . .
But you can also use the enterprise system in the consumer product to help
direct targeted advertising and thereby gain more revenue. Obviously you have to be care with privacy here. . . but it would be easy enough to build inside BeyondTV a process that watches what you are watching, and add overlay's in the guide or info area that are extra advertisements/ad-mini-features. And alternatively they might even be actionable (maybe launch a browser when a show is over to buy something or take a survey).

There are tons of uses for that enterprise stuff. . .

And you could sell advertising on the snapstream.net site as well. . .

Seems like the revenue problem is solvable. . . I understand full well that they are speaking to a niche customer base, but that might change if they get more innovative. . .

[cfaslave]

Originally Posted by sean_snider

I so desperately want all the things SageTV offers, with BeyondTVs polish. . . and then some. . .

What's this polish you speak of?

[jeffrey]

Sleeker/cleaner interface
Option to stream online videos (Like youtube, google videos and such ie: sageTV has this)
More options for tweaking the quality

[sean_snider]

Yeah that polish, plus a fully integrated media-center solution for archvied DVDs, videos, pictures, and music. I had to add the SageMC skin to make it look pretty enough, and also use the SageTV launcher so that I can use the "green" button on my remote.

[sdsalsero]

How about a better 'splitter' engine? (Did I mention this yet?)

I suspect this is the source of the poor FF behavior. What got me thinking about it was the stutter I experience on OTA recordings with dropouts, as well as the recent add-on to integrate Videoredo and automatically Quick Scan Fix (QSF) on recordings. Videoredo and QSF work great, and it'd be even greater if BTV could do something like this automatically during playback.

[TomXP411]

I've seen lots of insightful things here.

People have talked about integration, but SS has said that BTV will never become a DVD/Media player. It's a DVR and that's all. Quite frankly, I'm fine with that. I'm slowly building psuedo-integration via Event Ghost; I can now switch between DVD's, music, and TV by just hitting one button on my remote. Honestly, I can't stand BM: it's slow and clunky, and I don't see the point in using a remote to sort through thousands of media files when iTunes, WMP, and Winamp are much more efficient at it.

Now as to what I WOULD like to see:
CC - this is important for hearing-impaired individuals, and with the push for accessibility in software, I think it's important to get captioning working - even if it's just for one brand of tuner, like Hauppauge, I think it should be a priority.

Tagging shows: we should have user-defined categories for shows & channels. Also, we need a status flag for shows (new, partly watched, watched, save, okay to delete). Status tagging is especially important for families, so dads don't delete a kid's show... little kids like to watch a program several times, so just a "new" flag is inadequate. Set priorty flags, so a show is expired more quickly if the priority is low and saved longer if the priority is high. (no 3's are deleted if any 4's exist, for example)

TiVo-like searching: search on actor, title, description, category. Give us a choice Auto-record shows that meet these criteria or keep the search saved and regularly present a list of all the matches, so we can grab em. I don't know if TiVo's Thumbs Up/Down thing is patented, but that's sure a great feature.

Network integration & distributed processing: This itself would be a 5.0-worthy feature. The concept is simple (I believe Myth already does this): you can have any number of computers with any number of tuners & HD's. One central host manages scheduling and dispatching of jobs, and any BTV host on the network can:
* Host recorded content
* ShowSqueeze any show from any other host
* Record a show
* Play a show from any network drive

If any BTV host records a show, the other hosts should know about it in real-time. Also, if a computer is busy (say, someone is playing a game or browsing the web), and there are other computers available, the master server should shift a pending job to a computer that's not in use.

The master host should also be able to wake up & sleep computers on the network, so you don't have to leave all your PC's running all the time. It also reduces hardware requirements: your master server and recording machines can be relatively low powered boxes (even a NetTop can record several channels at once), and your higher-powered "main" computer(s) can be used for playback.

The other thing I'd love to see is Media Extender support, so BTV could serve content to Media Extender devices.

[Nick Burns]

Originally Posted by TomXP411

TiVo-like searching: search on actor, title, description, category. Give us a choice Auto-record shows that meet these criteria or keep the search saved and regularly present a list of all the matches, so we can grab em. I don't know if TiVo's Thumbs Up/Down thing is patented, but that's sure a great feature.

That feature is readily available now. You can search by keyword and category. Also check the KB on how to use search criteria.

[TomXP411]

Originally Posted by Nick Burns

That feature is readily available now. You can search by keyword and category. Also check the KB on how to use search criteria.

If you've ever spent a lot of time wit a TiVo, you'll see that BTV's search is still nowhere close to what I'm talking about.

[Fonceur]

Originally Posted by TomXP411

TiVo-like searching: search on actor, title, description, category. Give us a choice Auto-record shows that meet these criteria or keep the search saved and regularly present a list of all the matches, so we can grab em.

In addition to the "saved search" already mentioned, you could use BTV-Negociator to obtain those results...

[please3mta3]

What I would like to see is
MKV support.
DVD support.
CC on/off button
IMDB support with movie poster in the intermediate play window.

[geoffstewart]

I find myself spending time on tv.com or thetvdb.com to list episodes for a particular series to make sure I didn't miss one because of a quirk in the scheduler or power outage or something. I think this data should be integrated.... for a series, I should be able to pull up a history of all episodes (maybe just the current season) and compare to what has been successfully recorded (and possibly deleted).

Also, notification of when a show is *not* recorded is still missing for me. This could be limited to New Episodes or maybe you need to flag the shows you want to hear about... i don't care if Dora the Explorer is missed, but I do care if a prime time show is missed. So, a warning entry would work for this.

In summary:

1) TV series listing to compare with current recordings in BTV
2) Better notification of recordings the are *not* recorded.

Geoff

[LionRed]

I'd like to see a Recent/latest recordings to go view list. Have the option of how far back you want it to list.
Que up... for a play list. Not sure why but it takes me an hour to figure out what I want to watch after looking at all my recordings lol.
Maybe a move to archives option after watching.
I like Geoff's idea on missing recordings. Be cool of BTV looked up the schedule of when shows are suppose to come out...so kind of built in cross reference ? I missed Heroes last week...for some unknown reason =(

[RiderFan]

Originally Posted by LionRed

I'd like to see a Recent/latest recordings to go view list.(

You can do this already. When viewing your recordings, use the left right arrow buttons to select all recordings. They are in order of recently recorded.