Thanks for your comments, Mitch. I can appreciate your "damned if you do, damned if you don't" problem with posting responses on these forums.
But even so, your reasoning does not seem very sound, at least for those of us iin Melbourne (and probably elsewhere). You say Channel 7 did a swap on you earlier in the week. I don't know what you consider to be a "primary" source of information, but for we Melbourne viewers there was never any indication of a swap -- not in the Age's Green Guide, not in the Sunday Age's M Magazine, not in the daily papers, and not in Channel 7's own transmitted EPG.
But you guys are based in Sydney, right? Hmmm...
"Impact" is right. IceTV has done the hard yards, and spent the big bucks, to pave the way for other providers. Now that the High Court has had its say, it is only a matter of time before you face real competition. I am sure that many of us would love to keep supporting the innovator, but $100 per year is too much just for program guide data (especially if it is unreliable). IceTV justifies the higher charges by adding value through the "Interactive" features, which is a good business model if people want those features, and they work reliably.
But there has not been any update to the IceTV Interactive application for well over a year, despite niggling bugs and limitations, such as the ongoing "corrupted cache" problem in Windows, intermittent failures of the Media Center extended padding feature, the fact that Interactive does not perform a "true" synchronisation with the server (ie it makes a difference whether a series recording was originally scheduled via the web on in MCE, and if you do both your scheduled recordings can end up in a bit of a mess), and the fact that you cannot view or set hard padding values via the web (use of hard padding is pretty much essential, given the Australian channels' inability to run programs to schedule).
I have been through the free trial period, and I am currently still taking it one month at a time and continuing to evaluate the service. I have experienced all of the above issues during the past 2-3 months, and I know it is not just me because I have searched these forums and found the same problems discussed time and again. On top of this, the recent change in the SBS channel names caused a complete mess. I realise that this was not really IceTV's fault (SBS did not announce the change, and the corruption of all of my series settings was due to poor design in Media Center), the the management and communication around this change was sub-standard for a commercial service provider charging premium rates.
I am currently running with the Interactive features disabled, and my setup is now stable and predictable (unreliable EPG data notwishstanding). But I am really questioning the value for money of this setup. If I could get this same basic service for a lower price, I would take it. I know I can put together a "home brew" solution for free, but this creates separate issues of reliability and ongoing maintenance (avoiding this is what you pay for, surely).