I think if you research Neuros, you’ll find that we bend over backwards to try to take care of our early customers. We don’t always succeed, I can’t claim we have 100% customer satisfaction, but I think you’ll see that we try really hard at this, and really work to protect our customers from obsolescence with low cost upgrades, extended return periods, etc.

I was planning to build a MythTV-based PVR but now I’m thinking of buying this. Is it worth $300 to be a gamma tester? I’m linux-savvy and surely would learn a lot poking around the neuros hardware/software but how disappointed am I going to be when the 1.0 version comes out and I’m stuck with a gamma model?

I wanted to comment a bit about the state of the box and our vision for it in the hopes of clarifying for future purchasers. As mentioned previously, the LINK is a new type of device, which, we hope, will provide the best of both worlds: bringing the openness of the PC with the low cost, noise and east of use of electronics. To that end, we’ve chosen standard components for the design, so as to allow our users maximum flexibility. This is true both in standard hardware as well as software. Obviously, this is a more expensive approach, but in additional to the flexibility, it provides protection against obsolescence too.

While we’ll certainly continue to customize our software, we consider Ubuntu to be a great foundation that allows easy experimentation. The Ubuntu community has put a huge amount of effort into making it easy to use and customize. Likewise with the Mozilla standards browsers, there are plug-ins for many different content types and it ensures that our users will have access to all kinds of content.

The Neuros focus will be in building on top of these components to provide a more seamless experience that ties together downloaded and streamed content with a service that delivers the openess and comprehensive access to content that’s the hallmark with the ease of use “couch experience” that only electronics have historically delivered. At the same time, we’ll continue to deliver that in way that allows our most involved users to contribute to the way the device functions. We believe there’s no reason that 3rd parties won’t be as important to the TV as they were to the personal computer.

At this point, with our Gamma program we’re most looking for folks that are interested in helping contribute either with user feedback or particularly those Linux users that are interested in joining our community and experimenting with an open device for bringing internet TV to the TV.