[mythtv-users] commercially-produced mythboxes -- an idea

thor mythtv at lamedomainname.com
Sat Jan 15 02:23:41 EST 2005


On Thursday 13 January 2005 02:12 am, Chris Petersen wrote:

> This is all turning into something a lot more complex than I originally
> intended.  Things have been a bit hectic at work lately, so I'm going to
> put things on hold for awhile until I can sit down with someone who
> understands the supply chain and future availability of things like
> cpu's (I'm just the coder, not a sales guy).

 Heh. Doing a reference design is non-trivial. Instead of working from a 
retail/off-the-shelf perspective, one possible course of action would be to 
go at things from a chip/motherboard point of view. 

 One could (conceivably) think about the tuners/demuxers/i2c-thingy's that 
work at the PVR-250 and/or the HD-3000/air2pc level. Add in a standard CPU 
socket plus north/south/etc & video/sound out, and then look for bids. 
Someone like flextronics could probably get back to you with a ballpark 
figure without an excessive amount of work on either side.

 That ballpark would, as an outside guess, look roughly like a $100,000 quote 
to produce something akin to 2,000 boards at $500/per. That unit price would, 
of course, decline substantially with higher volumes.

 At a low 6 figure level ($100,000 + plus barebones staffing, bare website, 
outsourced fulfillment, etc.) one could think about actually raising money 
from the core myth community (e.g. 10-20 people putting in ~$2,000 each). 
That's less than a nice HDTV flatscreen per person. Please note that you 
cannot legally solicit investment funds in the US without jumping through a 
huge number of legal hoops (heh, land of the free, home of the brave, etc.).

 Even if the reference design is a "failure" (ie. 20 investors end up with 
hardware worth $500 after having put in $2,000 each), there is still enormous 
scope to re-purpose the reference design expertise. Transmeta, for one, is 
obviously looking to save their skin by making (myth-based?) set-top boxes. 

 There is also, of course, the distinct possibility of burning through 
hundreds of thousands of dollars, humming and hawing about the nature of the 
universe, and ending up with jack squat.

 Ain't the free market messy?

- thor
 

 


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