I see a lot of people apparently ready to jump ship right away after the announcement. It kind of surprises me. -- I don't see why there seems to be so much hysteria. I'm sad that a nice product won't be continued, but I'm not jumping ship. In fact, I just bought another device. So I'll tell a story... which may put this in perspective for some.
I was (and still am) a big fan of ReplayTVs. They were a precursor of Tivos (and to the end were better, IMHO). The company was started in 1997 and continued production until 2005. In 2011 the company who had the rights decided to discontinue the guide service. There was enough hue and cry that they decided to continue indefinitely. Now it is true that there were "lifetime" contracts in this case and not for squeezebox devices, but still, pressure from the community can force a company to continue services, especially if they are not expensive, which surely the services provided by mysqueezebox.com are. We only gave up when digital broadcast TV came to pass. ReplayTVs are all analog and it was a lot of trouble to make things work with converter boxes. If we could get cable where we live now we would probably have them still. Obviously some people are still operating their ReplayTVs and we were able to sell ours even very late in the game. I also own two audiotrons which should still work with music alone but I stopped using them for various reasons and got a Squeezebox. I just checked on their status: Production stopped in 2004. "Turtle Beach continued to support TurtleRadio until March 2007. After that time, the TurtleRadio website was retired and users had to change the configuration of their AudioTron to use a local file to set the list of radio stations that their AudioTron could stream. In March 2010, Turtle Beach implemented a redirect that allows the AudioTron to be used with the Webstation Radio Database. Similar to the TurtleRadio website, users can create accounts and select their own favorites from thousands of radio stations which will then be available on the AudioTron." This community seems similar to the ReplayTV one, with lots of people who like the product and are also have a lot of technical expertise. I wouldn't put a lot of money into this system now, but I'm also not jumping ship. OK, I read about the other options, but decided to stay where I am. I'm afraid the trade-offs are similar to the ReplayTV vs Tivo ones -- one is more techy with features that appeal to me, one is "easier to use" but without as much flexibility. It seems to me there will be no trouble keeping it all working for a few years. By that time maybe something will excite me and I'll be ready to switch. This is an area one would expect some changes... But who knows. Most people don't seem to be interested in products that have more features (because they are too hard to set up?). But we're probably almost insane with music and video flowing around the house from here to there to everywhere including Tivos and a googleTV and squeezeboxes and android phones and, of course, computers. Judy ------------------------------------------------------------------------ pyewackett's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=9172 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=97914 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
