Concept question

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  • [Deleted User][Deleted User] Posts: 196
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    Bob_Cat wrote: »
    Humax made a PVR with a removable hard disk drive, it was quite unsuccessful. It was based on a caddy which at the time was a fairly standard design. Ok, the market for PVRs has grown, but I think consumers have changed that much.

    It adds a cost which most people don't care for, it adds a mechanical failure point, it adds a support issue and an expectation of flexibility which consumers may misinterpret.

    Don't remember that one, but given that SATA drives are hot swappable unlike IDE drives and "caddies" are no more thatn a simple cage, I think it's worth looking at again. I would certainly consider that more preferable to the external drive arrangement on current models.

    Of course with the trends towards Media-NAS perhaps the way forward is to incorporate tuners into a NAS box acting as the central media server for the house.
  • [Deleted User][Deleted User] Posts: 12
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    Bob_Cat wrote: »
    I have a question that I would like to ask out of curiosity. I recently saw that a provider in another country is going to be providing customers a PVR/DTR product and while it contains a certain size of hard disk inside you don't get to use the full capacity by default. They charge different amounts depending on how much disk space you want and you can upgrade the available space of your DTR at any time.

    So, my question is:
    What do you think about buying a product, at a lesser price, which you can later 'unlock' the potential of with an incremental payment?
    Would you be interested to buy a 500GB HD DTR for a base price, lets say, £200 and then choose to either pay in small increments to rent extra capacity, or make a one-time payment to unlock more than double the capacity?
    Would you buy a 500GB SD DTR, for again say £200, and have it limited to SD with up-scaling of SD to HD, but knowing that you can unlock full HD decoding at a later date for another incremental cost?

    Obviously there will be the people who will respond saying "I just want it all and cheap", of course you would but looking at the above suggestions and assuming I am right in saying the fact that products have a real cost which is not artificially inflated, would you think people would welcome the opportunity to buy at a reduced market rate?

    A removabale disk like in a NAS would be more sensible as replacing this would not affect warranty.
    But on the subject of upgradability, it would have been much more environmentally friendly for manufacturers to have provided 'swappable' tuners in their devices. We could all have benefitted from fitting a DVB-T2 Freeview HD tuner to existing kit by a simple swap out, like high end Hi-Fi manufacturers provide with their kit. Instead we see set top boxes sent to landfill because we can't get HD. This is not a criticism of Humax in particular, it applies to every manufacturer out there. How many HD ready TV's will never be used with an HD source?
  • [Deleted User][Deleted User] Posts: 2
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    The idea of paying to unlock extra features works well for professional kit, or for equipment where the development costs are large compared to manufacturing costs. But for mass produced consumer electronics, where the development costs are spread over more units produced, the margins are different and it would be hard to justify selling the locked version with a much lower profit margin or charging a disproportionate increase for the unlocked version. Your customers would probably just see this as having to pay again for something they have already bought.

    In the case of professional equipment things are different. The component and manufacturing costs are small compared to the development costs. In television studios it's quite common to have an HD capable vision mixer which is locked to only work in SD mode, but can be unlocked using a licence code either permanently or for a short time, and the full mixer or just one or two banks for different prices.

    @somersetbob, it would take a lot more than just replacing the tuner to upgrade an SD set top box to HD. And I think most boxes end up in landfill because they break down and are cheaper to replace than repair. I have had quite a few fail in a short time - though my three Humax boxes have given good service so far…
  • [Deleted User][Deleted User] Posts: 102
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    aldaweb wrote: »
    Of course with the trends towards Media-NAS perhaps the way forward is to incorporate tuners into a NAS box acting as the central media server for the house.

    That's what the T2 could become when it gets its media server capability, it has an ethernet port and a hard drive, it shouldn't take anything more than software to tweak functionality and add lots of codecs to complete the transformation. Of course adding codecs would involve expense to the end user.
  • [Deleted User][Deleted User] Posts: 209
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    Bob_Cat wrote: »
    HTPCs have greater potential, but rarely do they allow the average user to exploit that potential. You may argue otherwise, but I have tested extensively on this subject and would disagree.

    I agree with you, more's the pity. Using Windows XP was a complete pain - more registry hacks than channels. I wasted an entire Christams holiday getting it to work. Windows 7 is a lot better - but the usability is still too complicated for the average user (i.e. my better half). I'll probably have one more go - purely to get Saorsat and Freesat onto the same EPG. (A Media-NAS sounds even better, but I can't see myself putting the necessary work in.)

    In relation to your original post, I tend to agree with scrishton. The concept is well proven in Industry, PBX's are another example. However, it may not carry to the consumer side. Having said that, I'd gladly pay £150 to unlock an extra 1Tb on my HDR so maybe there is a market.
  • [Deleted User][Deleted User] Posts: 1,332
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    Thanks Hillel, et al.
  • [Deleted User][Deleted User] Posts: 12
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    scrishton wrote: »
    The idea of paying to unlock extra features works well for professional kit, or for equipment where the development costs are large compared to manufacturing costs. But for mass produced consumer electronics, where the development costs are spread over more units produced, the margins are different and it would be hard to justify selling the locked version with a much lower profit margin or charging a disproportionate increase for the unlocked version. Your customers would probably just see this as having to pay again for something they have already bought.

    In the case of professional equipment things are different. The component and manufacturing costs are small compared to the development costs. In television studios it's quite common to have an HD capable vision mixer which is locked to only work in SD mode, but can be unlocked using a licence code either permanently or for a short time, and the full mixer or just one or two banks for different prices.

    @somersetbob, it would take a lot more than just replacing the tuner to upgrade an SD set top box to HD. And I think most boxes end up in landfill because they break down and are cheaper to replace than repair. I have had quite a few fail in a short time - though my three Humax boxes have given good service so far…

    The idea of upgrading tuners is really aimed at the TV manufacturers, I understand that in the case of a PVR it would be more complex. As for the replace not repair this has frustrated me for years even with so called professional equipment, sometimes you can't even open the unit without breaking it. Maybe my background in aerospace electronics gives me a bias towards being able to repair things, whereas for consumer products are all about unit manufacturing cost.
    As for unlocking more capability, I don't think it makes much sense for most consumers.
  • [Deleted User][Deleted User] Posts: 1,332
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    SomersetBob,

    The problem with upgrades to T2 is the fact that not only does the tuner need to be upgraded, but also the MPEG decoder, the graphics layer, the RAM and add on to that the fact that the CPU isn't fast enough in most SD products to manage the modern data requirements, then it becomes impractical to upgrade. Unlike the PC world where upgrades are common because performance is the demand, in consumer electronics it is features which get upgraded. The Humax products have tended to be upgraded with new software when that is viable to do so, but when an entirely new approach is needed you have to upgrade the hardware. The lower the cost of a product is related to how very highly integrated they can become, almost everything exists (where possible) on the same chip (SoC or "System on Chip"). For example the costs of TVs has dropped dramatically not only because the panels are cheaper to make but because the entire electronics for the product can now be done on one chip, compared to a four year old TV product which I opened up once that contained 12 different PCBs each with at least two significant ICs!

    If we switched to entirely modular designs then it would become a nightmare to support (a la PC) and it would be a very uneconomical/ecological design.
  • jw75jw75 Posts: 391
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    Bob_Cat wrote: »
    HTPCs have greater potential, but rarely do they allow the average user to exploit that potential. You may argue otherwise, but I have tested extensively on this subject and would disagree.

    On the contrary, I agree. The approach isn't suitable for mass-market (though PC manufacturers such as Dell have "build-you-own" configuration options,and there are limited-function builds of some HTPC software). Windows is not really for STBs (the constant nagging for updates and re-starts is a pain), but plenty of STBs use Linux kernels already. What I was suggesting was a restricted set of options which are fully-tested (!) before release.

    I also see the point about hardware modularity. You need to keep board and component cost down. But, if you have a box with DVB-T2 capability, it will handle DVB-T as well, and you can enable that through software just as easily as you can configure HDD capacity. No?

    The sort of popular features that could be chargeable through software locks and upgrades might include:
    a. BBC iPlayer enhancements (You-thingy replacement, web-only access for terrestrial boxes)
    b. USB operation (!)- external storage, or media play-back
    c. Internet web browser (not a restricted portal with "apps" or widgets )
    d. 3D content
    e. DLNA/UPnP
    ..
    z. anything from the wish-lists on this forum that got enough votes

    At present, you have to load all the features into one box, even though users may not want them. This results in a fairly expensive product that puts off potential purchasers. I can't imagine it's the hardware that makes the latest boxes cost £300. Many users may be happy to pay for a fully-loaded system, but the others are being lost to competitors.

    Modularity of software options could create an after-sales market for upgrades and a revenue stream to pay for development. Unlike the HDD options, it wouldn't add cost to the retail unit that you might not get back.

    I don't know if this approach would work in a commercial environment. The marketers who make the decisions might find it hard to adjust to a new business model.

    I note that many satellite users have switched to Linux receivers that allow use of third-party software. These boxes are not cheap, even though they can't cost more to build than your own products. I'm not suggesting you go that far, but at least they demonstrate that customisation is possible, and that there's a demand.
  • trilobitetrilobite Posts: 2,351
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    The "pay extra, to unlock better features" sounds like a Sky or Tivo tactic.

    I am not a fan of that. Far better to manufacture models with physicallly different features, maybe different sizes of disk capacity that the user can upgrade if desired.

    Technology changes quite rapidly, so it seems to make sense to buy a completely new model every five years or so.

    I got an HDR-Fox T2 (1Tb) for Christmas, and it really does blow the old Humax 8000T and Thomson DHD4000 boxes out of the water. Accurate Record, Series Record, Alternate Instance, record two and watch a third channel at the same time, have proved to be exceedingly useful. Very well done.

    My only niggle with the HDR-Fox T2 is that when recording in standby, pressing the power ON button does not get the television to switch to the appropriate scart input. (The old DHD4000 did this perfectly). Instead, you have to fiddle with the tv remote, selecting the scart manually.

    HDR-Fox T2 is currently on software version 1.00.04.
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