A word of thanks....for your software

[rizzo]

Let me first state that I generally despise paying for software. Generally speaking, anyone that writes software for the Windows platform has to deal with the millions of hardware/software combinations, hardware drivers, Microsoft software/updates, user errors, and everything else in between. By the time you use it, it's broken, buggy, doesn't do what you want it to and wasted hours or days of your life that you'll never get back. Who would want to pay for that?

Enter SageTV. I have been using this product for several years on and off. I've been through MythTV, Snapstream, WMC 2005, Vista MC and GBPVR...none of which come close to Sage. I consider myself an advanced computer user and VERY PICKY about control over my TV. There's just too many channels, too many programs, series and movies and not enough time in the day to get my money's worth out of my cable bill each month.

Sage is the ONLY product I've found that "gets it" when it comes to extenders. They spent a lot of time and energy getting the MVP to work, and now the HD Extender. They understand that no one wants a big, noisy computer sitting next to their TV. For $800 I can build a PC capable of playing back High-Def content, or spend $200 on an extender. It's stupid-simple. It's the reason I chose Sage.

Times have changed. Cable is no longer 36 channels of news, sports and movies. There are literally hundreds of channels to cover just about every taste in the world. Satellite and now IPTV and internet have entered into the mix and this further complicates matters. Frey and others like them heard the call long ago and set about to do something about it. TiVo was a great commercial solution at first, but people like me soon tired of the restrictions about what THEY could do with the content THEY paid to watch. Soon, TiVo was no longer the only option. People could begin finding a solution to the problem of too much information, and organizing it in a way that they could get the most benefit from the content they are paying for.

My hat goes off to Sage in particular because I feel they have kept their focus on the customer from the beginning. Although Snapstream did a good job at first, they haven't kept up with the technology or allowed the users to improve on what they had built (unlike Sage's Studio) in an easy way. They didn't have the foresight to write their code in a language easily ported to other platforms. They decided to never spend the time getting the MVP working natively as an extender for their product. Their most recent problem seems to be that they are spending more time developing their product for Enterprise customers, and not their original end users.

I understand the need for new releases and new "versions" of software. Version 6 of Sage has been around awhile...and it shows. That's not a put-down, it's a testament to the stability of the code. Because the software provides the user to customize it damn-near any way they want, it's a non-issue that it may not be as "pretty" or "flashy" as other products. SageTV 6 is the most rock-solid, useful, and configurable software I've ever used. I gladly paid what I consider to be a reasonable price for the core and two extender/placeshifter licenses, and never looked back.

I'm not a shill, and I don't work for Sage, nor have anything invested in it other than the licenses stated above. I just thought I'd let you and the rest of the Sage community responsible for writing the enhancements and plugins for this great product know how much I appreciate your hard work...every day when I turn on my TV.

- Rob