It's possible that the reviews are pretty old, and were never updated. Perhaps IMate changed that.

To be truthful, I don't have any way of verifying my claim that you don't need the Live service, because the frame appears to have issues connecting to an Apple Airport Extreme. It appears that it is not compatible with any security method that Apple has created - even WEP (is it standard WEP encryption? The description seems to indicate it's some other kind). I can connect without encryption, but I clearly don't want to do that, so I'm in contact with the company to try to get this figured out.

Still, on the frame its self, the Live service and the RSS feeds appear to be separate.