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Technology Lifestyle Hands on with Seven's Australian TiVo
Technology Lifestyle Hands on with Seven's Australian TiVo | Hands on with Seven's Australian TiVo |
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| by Adam Turner | |
| Tuesday, 01 July 2008 | |
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Page 1 of 3 I'm now waiting on a review unit to play with at home, but today it made a very good first impression. The Australian TiVo offers the four vital features that almost every other PVR on the Australian market lack - a proper Electronic Program Guide, a "Season Pass" feature, intelligent storage management and a generous margin for error when it comes to scheduling recordings. In my experience, a PVR lacking any of these features is a waste of time and money. Yes, I know a look at the US TiVo would have already told you most of these things, but remember that the Australian TiVo is under the control of one of the local broadcasters - the Seven Network. Australia's commercial free-to-air broadcasters have fought tooth and nail against recorders such as TiVo for years. We already knew Seven intended to disable ad-skipping (it offers up to 30x fast forward and rewind, but not a 30 second skip) so I was nervous as to how else Seven might knobble the TiVo before releasing it in Australia. It appears that my fears were unfounded. Some extra features won't be unlocked until next year's firmware update, which won't be free, but I'll get to that in a minute. Ad-skipping aside, the Australian TiVo appears to offer all the PVR-related features of a Vista Media Centre, but hopefully with greater stability than my bipolar beast. The TiVo features two high definition TV tuners, letting you do cool things like record two shows at once. It automatically keeps a buffer of the last 30 minutes of the channel you're currently watching and the last channel you were watching, so you can pause and even rewind live TV. If you've resumed a movie after a five minute pause to make coffee, it's easy to forget that you're time shifting rather than watching live TV. With most PVRs, if you change channel during an ad break, the five minutes in the buffer is often lost and you're thrown forward to the present with no way of getting that five minutes back. It seems the TiVo will retain that five minutes if you flick to a second channel, but it will be lost if you then flick to a third channel. My dream PVR would pop up a warning if I tried to change channel whilst time shifting. The TiVo engineers I met today agreed it is a good idea, so perhaps it could appear in a future firmware upgrade. The TiVo features a mediocre 160 GB hard drive, which is only good for around 20 to 30 hours of high-def content or 60 hours of standard-def - less when you consider that recordings need to run over to make sure you get the end of your show (we'll get to that in a minute as well). There's an eSATA port for connecting an external hard drive, but it won't be enabled until a future firmware upgrade. I can forgive the TiVo's small hard drive thanks to the inclusion of intelligent storage management the likes of which I've only seen on computer-based PVRs. The TiVo will automatically delete old recordings based on your preferences. If you set it to record your favourite show every week, you can tell it how many episodes to keep. If you set it to two or three then you won't need to manually go through deleting old recordings. This is fantastic if you want to record Bob the Builder every day for your kids, but not have to worry about it failing to record Lost because the hard drive is full of kids shows. You can also set a recording to be kept until you need the space, or until you choose to delete it. Intelligent storage management is a PVR essential in my book, but the TiVo has a few other impressive tricks up its sleeve. CONTINUED |
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