It's TWO cups of decent coffee!

How is $5 a month for your TV listings too expensive? $60/yr? Heck, I wish more things were that price.

You can't expect them to do it for a loss?

Seriously, how in good conscience can you complain about $5/mo AND expect them to take risks and possibly lose much, much more than $5/mo?

_________________
"The amount of time needed to solve a problem is inversely proportionate to the complexity of the solution" -- Me

KM: R5.5
CPU: Athlon 3800+
Vid: nvidia 7300GT
Snd: Chaintech av-710
Tuner: PVR150
HD: 1000gb sata + 750gb sata + 500gb usb

I'll probably have to try out scraping first. But I do know that I'm already paying >$12/month to the electric company to keep this 120-watt MythTV computer running 24x7. That doesn't even include the cable box which I've got powered on all the time also so MythTV can record from it.

Well I will pay the $15 to get this started. I do think $5 per month is high for the data service. However, I choose to trust the developers of schedulesdirect and believe that this is only temporary.

Answer #1 on datadirect's website.


That is the great thing about OpenSource if someone wants to code a kick butt screen scraper and integrate with MythTV you are free to do so. Ask TiVo or your CableCo if you can drop thier monthly charges and instead build scripts to screen scrape data.

I'm in for the $15 for 3 months.

As I understand it, the Schedules Direct plan is to START at $15 for the first 3 months, then figure out a (presumably lower) rate that "covers the bills"

I gather that the rate after the 3rd month will depend on the number of users who sign up in the first 3 months.

It seems to me then, that those not wiling to pony-up the first $15 are actually going to contribute to the rates remaining high.

IMO, not getting in is a bit short-sighted, but only time will tell.

$5 a month is a bit high for me, and I'd like to see $30/year or less for this data.

BUT............

This is an OSS project that I feel I MUST support.

$5 a month is about a pack of cigarettes to me, and that's a drop in the bucket. Think about how much you might spend at McDonnalds/Wendy's/KFC/Pizza Hut/etc. every time you go. $5 a month is nothing. With Gas at $3 a gallon, this is still an unbeatable deal.

Supporting Schedules Direct will also put MythTV (and KnoppMyth) into the spotlight. All could benefit from this, and I'll gladly support it on the hope that the annual cost will eventually hit the level I hope for.

Perhaps.... Schedules Direct is thinking of someway to let the er, mmmm, Windoze crowd use this data, too? That could help lower individual costs, too.

If a fraction of the funds help out MythTV and KnoppMyth....it helps us all.

Edit:

One last thought:

It's a ONE TIME $15 charge. It's a NON-RECURRING cost, and if their costs don't come down after three months, you can elect to not renew. They are trying to gague user demand, and this seems to be the only clear way that they can measure it.

If you SUPPORT their goal of $20/year....let them know by putting the $15 up front now.

I for one am willing to bet $15 on the minds that brought us MythTV.

Even if the price doesn't go down I can get a lot of months... no years of Schedules Direct for the price of a copy of Vista Home Premium, and I won't have to loose sleep at night.

The best way to make schedules Direct succeed is to vote with your wallet. If the community rallies behind this it will grow fast.

Martian

_________________
ABIT NF-M2 nView | Athlon 64 X2 3800+ | 2GB DDR2 800 | HDHomerun | GeForce 6150 (onboard) | WD 640 GB SATA HD | DVD-RW (sata) | StreamZap IR receiver with Logitech Harmony remote

Vizio 37" LCD HDTV (1080p)

I am frankly suprised at this thread. When most people said they would pay for this data, I would be very suprised if any of them meant $5. Paying more then a buck or two for this data is completely insane.

Who would start using Myth given this situation? If you can get a Tivo for much less then a PC and the monthly costs are roughly the same, what real niche is myth filling? I know there are benefits to myth over Tivo, but really are they worth more cost and a bit more work?

Ranting aside, I may consider their initial offer of $15 as a one time thing, but if the price is more then $2 a month to renew then no way.

Yet people will pay $5-10 to get the four Saturday papers for their TV Guides...

_________________
"The amount of time needed to solve a problem is inversely proportionate to the complexity of the solution" -- Me

KM: R5.5
CPU: Athlon 3800+
Vid: nvidia 7300GT
Snd: Chaintech av-710
Tuner: PVR150
HD: 1000gb sata + 750gb sata + 500gb usb

I would tend to agree with JoeJoe97. I think that $5 a month will discourage any newbie from trying mythtv. Even with free listing services, mythtv is not cheaper than TiVo as the cost of decent hardware adds up. I know a few friends I have talked this past month were considering mythtv, but were unwilling to try it given the listing uncertainty. If the cost is the same as TiVo, far less will try it. For those of us who use and love it, well, we are willing to pay.

The costs are not the same. Tivo is much more. Here are their current monthly fees:
1 year monthly - $17 = $204 a year
2 year monthly - $15 = $180 a year
3 year monthly - $13 = $156 a year

1 year pre-paid - $179
2 year pre-paid - $299 ($150 a year)
3 year pre-paid - $299 ($100 a year) 4th year is free

They used to offer a lifetime subscription fee for like $300. They discontinued that option about 2 years ago?
My cable company charges $20 a month for their dual tuner PVR. It can record about 80 hours of SD tv shows. It can't play music from my audio collection, view videos (in various formats), view photos, read web pages, read RSS feeds, access my shared directories on my LAN, play DVDs, export to DVD, play old school arcade games.
<sarcasm>MythTV absolutely has no benefits over the cable company DVR!</sarcasm>.

Again no one is forcing you to use this service.

Even if the rates stay at $5/mo (Which I hope it won't) I'd like to see the accounting that says myth is not cheaper than TiVo. I guess it depends on if you run out to buy a whole new PC because you want to build a myth box. I built my first myth on discarded hardware (FC4 using Jarrod's Guide) So all it really cost me was ~$120 because I had to buy a PVR-150. I had a ReplayTV w/lifetime subscription which died on me a few times. I got sick of resurrecting it, so I figured I'd try Myth before buying a TiVo. I havn't looked back since. (the replay also cost me more than $120.

My up-front costs were lower than TiVo hardware. Even if I had to pay an extra $15 for a 3 month subscription, that's still lower than the monthly on TiVo. Aren't they asking $10/month or so?

It wasn't until after I got hooked on Myth that I built a ground-up myth box and switched to KM. The argument about decent hardware is sort of backward. With TiVo, buying above-spec hardware is not an option. The fact that you CAN go crazy with Myth is a feature. What do you think a TiVo with a 1Tb SATA RAID would cost? What if you want to throw some extra RAM at the TiVo to improve transcode performance? Oh, wait you can't transcode on the TiVo can you? You can't even get your videos OFF the TiVo unless you pay extra for the privilege, and then you get DRM-polluted crap, even MCE DRM's recorded content. Eff that!

Seriously, Schedules Direct has stated the goal of providing the service as cheaply as possible. TiVo and MS, are in it to empty your wallets, plain and simple.

Interesting - they got the data much cheaper than the normal rate: http://mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-user ... 89442.html

"TMS intentionally gave us a good deal; many people there
felt bad about taking down the Labs service..."

"I really wish that I could share the fee structure so you all could
understand what we went through to make this happen (I'm still hoping
that TMS will eventually let us publish that info)."

_________________
KnoppMyth R5.5
MythiC Dragon v2.0
Join the KnoppMyth Frappr!

Perhaps I was a bit too quick to judge Tivo to be cheaper. $8.31 per month Vs $5 per month. So if we go with the $100 Tivo box (TiVo® Series2™ DT DVR) and a $500 PC (this is about what I spent, perhaps high now as prices of hardware drop continously) we are talking about 10 years from now the Myth box becomes the cheaper option.

There are other benefits to myth, as has been stated in this thread. I would think this would be some discouragement start using myth, however. For me at least, the price was a big factor that pointed me towards myth in the fist place. All the things that made it better then a Tivo were just icing on the cake.

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