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Tired Of The Telly? Reprogram It
from the giving-consumers-what-they-want dept
As the new ReplayTV continues to take away the features that make it worth buying, a new company is making a bet that it makes sense to offer technology that lets consumers do what they want. They're selling a set top box, called the Telly MC1000 Digital Entertainment Center that. It sounds like quite a box, with all the typical TiVo-style features. However, the more interesting point is that the company behind it, Interact-TV, is actively encouraging people to hack the box. They want people to build add-ons and make the device more useful. They're not trying to bend to the wishes of the broadcast industry, but to the consumers who are actually buying the box. Of course, right now, the box is a bit on the expensive side ($900), but hopefully the price starts to drop over time - and additional features make it even more valuable. They're really positioning this as a digital entertainment hub. However, unlike previous top-down attempts to create such a device, they're basically admitting that they're not sure what people will do with it - so they might as well make it easy for anyone to do anything they want with it. What a concept.
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The XBox is sold at a loss because Microsoft makes money on the software (and because they simply want to increase their market share). Hence, they discourage hacking because they want to guarantee that people who buy an XBox will buy their software... not use it with free software and basically get an incredibly cheap computer. The reason the product mentioned in this article is so expensive is probably because the hardware is being sold at a slight profit. Basically, the price will come down as the supplier prices for the components come down. But then the question becomes: if you are technically inclined, could you do this yourself cheaper?
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