AltEPG

I'm sure you've got enough on your plate currently Dave but it would cool to see actually how many your getting signed up to the altEPG, when everythings calmed down a bit I'm sure it wouldnt take much to write a little script to show how many are on the system and have it auto update on the altEPG website.

Must admit I was gobsmacked when I saw you posted this on another thread

healeydave wrote:Probably about the first 90 alpha testers.

There was me thinking it was more like a dozen or so


Furbag

I just checked the database and there are 560 Tivos registered

Wow. How many on dialup?

Good grief poppadum

As you say Tivomas would also be interesting to see how many still on dial up.

Furbag

I've still got two to add

tivomas wrote:I've still got two to add

Me too both dial ups as well.

Furbag

Surely most are on dial up?: ( I have 2 on DU though would love to connect my tivos to the home network but it all seems too daunting)

poppadum wrote:I just checked the database and there are 560 Tivos registered

I have three registered but only using one, at present.

Probably two at most after the change.

I am wondering how many people are registered.

Alek

Alek wrote:I am wondering how many people are registered.

yes that's interesting me too. It seems a lot of people have more than 1 tivo. I think I saw someone had 9 of them!

Rachel wrote:

Alek wrote:I am wondering how many people are registered.

yes that's interesting me too. It seems a lot of people have more than 1 tivo. I think I saw someone had 9 of them!

membership of the forum has increased by 450 since 16th Feb!

People who are using the AltEPG at present are mainly using a secondary Tivo as a test. But most people only have one Tivo. When the main Tivo service runs out of data for the main channels on their Tivos on or around 11th June there is going to be a huge further surge of registrations.

My money would be on between 2,000 and 5,000 Tivos being registered eventually although how many of those will be in use daily is anyone's guess. However you should not ignore stored Account Closed Tivos that will be brought back in to use. I have one I collected from a guy in Crawley around three years ago that has been sitting gathering dust since then that I intend to give to a friend in his 60s who watches a lot of television to use with the AltEPG.

Free to run compared to £120 per annum to run is going to bring a lot of Tivos back in to use.

Alek wrote:I am wondering how many people are registered.

In the database there are now:
465 users
599 tivos (279 marked as using dialup)

Pete77 wrote:My money would be on between 2,000 and 5,000 Tivos being registered eventually

If you're right Pete, we're going to need a larger scale dialup solution(s). Given the likely ongoing costs of installation and line rental for the incoming lines (and bandwidth) for a dialup platform, it may be cheaper in the long run to get a batch of network cards made. Does anyone have any ideas about how to go about that or the likely cost?

poppadum wrote:Given the likely ongoing costs of installation and line rental for the incoming lines (and bandwidth) for a dialup platform, it may be cheaper in the long run to get a batch of network cards made. Does anyone have any ideas about how to go about that or the likely cost?

Check out this thread from two years ago at www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthrea ... ight=batch started by Skolink who is based in Christchurch, New Zealand saying he could let people have them for 60NZD each + postage. If he made them in batches of 100 he might be able to offer better pricing still.

However I think you ignore the fact that for most Tivo users of completely unmodified Tivos or at least with just replaced hard drive from Tivoheaven, Tivoland or TC that not being able to collect the EPG data by dialup and having to instead install a Cachecard and reimage the hard drive and so on may mean all the difference between life and death for their Tivo. Most of these users just won't have the ability to start imaging their own hard drives even though they might manage to open their Tivo to fit a new hard drive imaged professionally by someone else.

Surely there must be a lot of heavily disused dial up points of presence that could provide unlimited capacity so long as people could stand to pay the costs of an 0845 call. These PoPs make enough money from the 0845 revenue share component of the call to not want to charge anything further (I have just such an 0845 number for fax2email with nktelecom.co.uk who do not charge any fee for the number). As 0845 calls are now included in BT's Anytime and Weekend free call minutes this seems like a possible workable solution to me. The danger however is that as the AltEPG is in the hands of heavy duty techies they forget how frightening any talk of opening up your Tivo or imaging drives is to most Tivo users.

My experience so far with the 01274 number shows that a dial up number that is mainly engaged most of the day does become very frustrating indeed and then you also have the nasty additional issue with the ringback problem which causes a charge each time it happens. That old Tivo that has been sitting gathering dust for the last three years with a status of account closed will only come back in to use if a dialup based solution can be found.

My guess is much lower than Pete's guess.

There's no reason to delay registering your TiVo until June 1st. You don't have to switch just because you've registered.

I think it will be under a thousand TiVos go live.

Pete77 wrote:Surely there must be a lot of heavily disused dial up points of presence that could provide unlimited capacity so long as people could stand to pay the costs of an 0845 call. These PoPs make enough money from the 0845 revenue share component of the call to not want to charge anything further (I have just such an 0845 number for fax2email with nktelecom.co.uk who do not charge any fee for the number). As 0845 calls are now included in BT's Anytime and Weekend free call minutes this seems like a possible workable solution to me.

If something along those lines (i.e. a commercial dialup platform funded entirely by 0845 call revenues) could be found it sounds ideal. Would you mind investigating further, Pete?

Pete77 wrote:The danger however is that as the AltEPG is in the hands of heavy duty techies they forget how frightening any talk of opening up your Tivo or imaging drives is to most Tivo users.

Point taken - not everybody wants to be opening up their machine to install and configure a network card. I was just thinking out loud about the cheapest and most reliable solution going forward.