Before posting this, I thought I should do a search for Sezmi, and I noticed the date on the original post (May '0
. When BOL mentioned this, I immediately went to sezmi.com to try and buy the thing. Of course, it wasn't available in my area, so I signed up to be notified by email.
Today I got that email. I browsed around the website, $149 (on sale) for the box, $4.99/mo for the service, and it's basically an over-the-air dual-tuner HD DVR with the capability to play YouTube videos, video podcasts, and it has some kind of network behind it to provide on demand movies and tv shows (for an additional fee, like Amazon VOD I guess). I remember being so freaking excited for this thing, and completely forgot about it until now!
Unfortunately, in today's world of Roku boxes, cheap media center HTPCs, Netflix streaming, Hulu, and the upcoming promise of GoogleTV, there is NO WAY I can justify paying $149/once + $4.99/mo for a DVR that only works with OTA digital broadcasts. I suppose it's cool that, if I lived in LA, I could pay $19.99/mo and get a selection of cable channels OTA, but...I'm just so disappointed. I guess for someone who doesn't want a full-on HTPC in their living room, yet wants to ditch cable and doesn't already subscribe to Netflix, this may be an OK match, but there's just so many other services (free and otherwise) that do everything this can do - and more - for substantially less money.
Does anybody have this service? What's it like in the real world?
I've been reading a lot about this recently, and it seems like all this tech already exists... much of it used by companies that have already gone bankrupt. Maybe they just were ahead of their time.
Tom expressed skepticism over the special antenna they talked about. I read somewhere this was a "smart antenna" - which is the name of an actual device proposed years ago by, if I recall, the CEA. It's been demo'd @ NAB, but has been hard to find in the wild. It took me ages to find mine. A smart antenna basically contains a bunch of directional elements & is autotuned to virtually point itself in the direction of the best signal for each station. The catch is that it has to connect to a tuner that can communicate with it. My STB & smart-antenna have 2 connections. Coax for RF & twisted pair (telephone type cord) for communication with the smart part. It works surprisingly well when DTV stations are all around you.

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