Dear D&M Holdings viewer:
With the recent purchase of ReplayTV from SonicBlue one of your spokeswomen (as it was reported) stated that the ability to "skip commercials while recording" (known here as CA) might be removed in the future. First please make sure your people understand the technology before making public statements. The fact is with CA turned on (or off for that matter), no commercial is removed from the video stream being recorded, this technology only "fast forwards" through those commercials during playback just like the CA on other VCR type devices (and even that is not 100%, some of the time we still need to manually fast forward by ourselves over commercials that do not get skipped). If a recorded show is later sent to some other user all of the original commercial content is also sent to the receiving unit (that information should make the commercial owner feel even better, since now not only did they get the original broadcasting of their commercial that they paid for, but also get a free shot at those customers who did not get to see the original broadcast who were send the recorded show), and that user can either view the commercials or not (their choice controlled by the CA on/off switch of by using the fast forward button, like others do on their VCRs).
Second, I think each and every current owner (and future owner for that matter) of ReplayTV would agree that while the Internet Video Sharing (IVS) is a wonderful feature, we would be willing to give up the feature as long as the local (room to room) video sharing feature was saved. If this feature were to also go away, none of the ReplayTV'ites (I just coined that one) who I personally know (and quite a few others that I only know from their posts on the Internet) would be willing to support ReplayTV any longer.
Consider this, the original ReplayTV company almost completely went under when the older units did not have these features. SonicBlue did pick up that business and they directly marketed the newer units based upon the features not currently available to it's competitor (the dreaded TIVO) to those of us who are now your customers. CA, room to room sharing and IVS where the most attractive features to most of us, and if too many of those features go away, we will be left with simply a TIVO named ReplayTV. There would be no reason for any of us to think about buying any additional units from D&M if those units did not allow room to room sharing. Most would simply go to your competitor simply because that company has a better overall customer recognition in the industry for personal video recorders.
Thank you for your attention, and your support of our favorite video "toy", and we hope you can finally do something great with the technology in our near future.
With the recent purchase of ReplayTV from SonicBlue one of your spokeswomen (as it was reported) stated that the ability to "skip commercials while recording" (known here as CA) might be removed in the future. First please make sure your people understand the technology before making public statements. The fact is with CA turned on (or off for that matter), no commercial is removed from the video stream being recorded, this technology only "fast forwards" through those commercials during playback just like the CA on other VCR type devices (and even that is not 100%, some of the time we still need to manually fast forward by ourselves over commercials that do not get skipped). If a recorded show is later sent to some other user all of the original commercial content is also sent to the receiving unit (that information should make the commercial owner feel even better, since now not only did they get the original broadcasting of their commercial that they paid for, but also get a free shot at those customers who did not get to see the original broadcast who were send the recorded show), and that user can either view the commercials or not (their choice controlled by the CA on/off switch of by using the fast forward button, like others do on their VCRs).
Second, I think each and every current owner (and future owner for that matter) of ReplayTV would agree that while the Internet Video Sharing (IVS) is a wonderful feature, we would be willing to give up the feature as long as the local (room to room) video sharing feature was saved. If this feature were to also go away, none of the ReplayTV'ites (I just coined that one) who I personally know (and quite a few others that I only know from their posts on the Internet) would be willing to support ReplayTV any longer.
Consider this, the original ReplayTV company almost completely went under when the older units did not have these features. SonicBlue did pick up that business and they directly marketed the newer units based upon the features not currently available to it's competitor (the dreaded TIVO) to those of us who are now your customers. CA, room to room sharing and IVS where the most attractive features to most of us, and if too many of those features go away, we will be left with simply a TIVO named ReplayTV. There would be no reason for any of us to think about buying any additional units from D&M if those units did not allow room to room sharing. Most would simply go to your competitor simply because that company has a better overall customer recognition in the industry for personal video recorders.
Thank you for your attention, and your support of our favorite video "toy", and we hope you can finally do something great with the technology in our near future.