[mythtv-users] re:MythTV production run
Mike Smith
mythtvyahoomike at hotmail.com
Tue May 4 17:45:46 EDT 2004
The DVR market is growing rapidly. Guys here are talking about selling
1000 units, which is really a small number. How does the future look like
if a startup company could find big investment money, sell a product based
on mythtv, design specialized hardware to reduce cost to around $200,
provide reliable EPG data, just compete with Tivo? I expect the number of
sold units would be tens of thousands a year, maybe millions a few years
later. The company could live without charging monthly fee to get more
customers by charging more for hardware instead.
The only difficulty seems to be writing drivers for specialized capture
card/mpeg encoder/mpeg decoder, which should be done in about 1 man-year.
For stability consideration, many features could (should?) be removed from
mythtv. Even so, an overhaul on mythtv would take about 5 man-year or maybe
less? So the financial requirement is not that high either. Ok, Cable
companies would not allow you to advertise mythtv, like what happened to
Tivo, but there are many other ways to advertise like
newspapers/radio/mails/.... When the startup company is small, the big
companies would not bother to sue you.
Any other major hurdles for a startup company? Anyone interested in this
topic?
Thanks
Mike
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