All of the David vs. Goliath posturing SonicBlue did with the studios was certainly nice and all, and it made for some good press – but it was stupid. They did not have the resources to sustain that fight – the odds were always that they’d run out of money before the studios did, if not lose the case outright – which probably wouldn’t bankrupted them in settlement anyway. There was never much of a chance they could win the case.

People, especially RTV fans, criticise TiVo for having DRM on TTG – but, like it or not, that was the only way they could do TTG without suffering the same fate as RTV. The FCC gave TTG the nod only because it protects the content and honors flags to limit transfers if the content providers wanrs to. (Almost never used.) The MPAA and NFL both lobbied, HARD, to block TTG, but failed.

I’d love open trading of shows myself, but I recognize that the industry is slow to change and you need to chip away at things slowly, not try to force the change all at once – or you get buried under lawyers. Napster, ReplayTV, Grokster, Kazaa, etc, have all experienced this.

But, aside from that, ReplayTV kept changing their business plans – sell boxes, no license the code, no sell boxes… Sell them for a flat fee, copy TiVo’s pricing, no try flat fees again… oops, back to TiVo’s pricing model. They changed pricing right before Christmas, I think that was Xmas 2005, with boxes in the retail channel already labeled as including lifetime subscriptions – but sold without them. That was a debacle.

They promised features like sharing shows between 4k and 5k units, USB WiFi support, and MP3 playback – then cancelled the work.

Some people think I’m anti-ReplayTV just because I’m pro-TiVo. That isn’t the case, I think RTV had a good product and I would like to see real competition in the standalone DVR market because it really drives creativity. I have some slim hope that Moxi’s entry into the market this fall may spur things a bit – but only slim because I was less than impressed by what I saw and heard at CES this year.

The new PC software is really just a new product with some effort to cash in on the ReplayTV name. They could’ve given it abilities to transfer content to/from the old boxes – but they didn’t. In fact, there is no compatibility or interaction with the old product at all.

And the limitations to just a couple of tuner models, etc, really makes it a limited product.

I really don’t know what DNNA is thinking.

But even if you’re going to go that route, the other solutions are better.

As for green on black – it seems some people really dislike it and others like it. Personally I always use green on black for my SSH windows, etc, and have been doing that since the old green-screen VT220 terminals. The colors on the site are the official TiVo colors, I took them from their style guide.

If you have an LJ account you can always use ?style=mine when reading communities, etc, and they’ll display in your style.

Myth TV will do that for free, if you have a few days of time to waste messing with it.

(This site is a contender for worst color scheme – green on black is nearly unreadable!)

A few years ago, loyal customers of the ReplayTV set top box might have made the switch, but now few people even remember the company’s name.