It’s a real product. It’s been successfully implemented in Microsoft’s eHome lab.
What does that tell us? It tells us the research and development money has already been invested. From an economic perspective, this is a sunk cost. Future decisions have to be made based on their own merit.
The operative variables at this point are only the cost of pushing the product to the market and the potential gains of doing so. DirecTV obviously believes in the profitability of such a product or they wouldn’t have invested so much in its realization. Releasing this product is sure to result in more subscriptions and more hardware sales (they aren’t going to give these tuners away for free).
I can personally vouch for this: DirecTV’s programming is attractive as it is. My biggest reason for not adopting it (next to increased monthly cost) is my devotion to media center. As a hobbiest I am absolutely unwilling to surrender my control to a stock DVR.
Anyway, this topic has see excellent coverage by others. If you would like to read more extensive coverage, see Chris Lanier’s write up. He asseses who is likely to blame for the current suspension.
#1 by nick at December 14th, 2008
As I told you the other day, I’ve been using SageTV since 2003 and I’d love to be able to keep using it. However, as time goes on it becomes more apparent to me that I’m either going to have to live with recording OTA content or pay a satellite provider for their DVR. I really don’t want to do that, but at the same time I’m a sports nut and having an HDTV without ESPN is pretty lame.
I was leaning toward DirecTV but between this and their pricing to get to a reasonable level of HD content, I think they may have pushed me toward their main competitor. Dish has a $25 a month package of nothing but HD channels. I’ll probably rent their DVR and see how it goes while I continue to use SageTV to record OTA content.
So lame. They’d have quickly won me as a new customer with this. Oh well.