[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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