[mythtv-users] The Death of MythTV in the US?

Brett Kosinski fancypantalons at gmail.com
Tue Apr 1 04:45:39 UTC 2008


>  The idea that renting boxes to subscribers is a "revenue stream" is
>  very new, and not universally accepted.

I'm not sure what you mean, exactly, by "revenue stream".  Compared to
the amount of money they receive from subscriptions alone, the amount
of revenue they might get from DSTBs is extremely small.  And these
days, most cable companies are offering package deals, including the
DSTB free or at a significantly subsidized price.  And many are
subsidizing the rollout of more advanced DSTBs to replace aging, older
models.

No, the DSTB offers one thing above all others:  control.  Control of
the hardware that's on their network.  Control of the software running
on those boxes.  And in turn, more control over services delivered to
the customer.  The DSTB opened the door for in-home ordering of
Pay-Per-View, not to mention Video-on-Demand, and continues to be the
platform upon which new services (both in the customer-facing sense,
and the cable operator sense) are deployed.  As such, I'd be very
surprised if they disappear any time soon.

Now, are they a pain to deploy?  Yeah, somewhat (although, TBH, I
think it's *far* harder than it needs to be).  Do things like box
heterogeneity cause headaches?  Sure.  But, in the end, the
flexibility they afford *far* outweighs the cost and headaches
involved.

Brett.


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