Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 01 July 2008 23:00
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 3
With seven out of ten Australians choosing free-to-air TV over the
Foxtel $100 per month pay TV option, and with most major TV shows
millions watch still shown on free-to-air TV, the TiVo proposition with
no subscription fees could well be the gold medal winner in the PVR
stakes.
TiVo – it’s all over the news, as is the latest chapter in the battle between Seven Network and the Foxtel pay TV empire, as David Leckie and James Wharburton talk up "the best" PVR in Australia which you won't have "to wait months for someone to install", and no subscription fees.
With free-to-air television in Australia still showing all the major hit TV shows in prime-time, the ones that get million-plus audiences that Foxtel can only dream about, the value of free-to-air TV in Australia is still very, very strong.
It’s also free – you just need a television, and if you want digital TV, you can just buy a cheap digital box. People are well used to recording TV programming on VCRs, DVDs and PVRs, but the facts are that the TiVo is still the world’s best personal hard disk based video recorder.
Heck, it’s the iPhone of personal video recorders, and while the Foxtel IQ box does all kinds of fancy tricks, it’s like the iPhone clone with lots of extra features that people don’t really care about – or at least, when compared with the iPhone’s sales and popularity, or in the PVR world, the TiVo itself.
TiVo has the winning features – a true EPG, the Season Pass to let you reliably record every show you want, the flexibility of extending recordings to never miss the end of a TV show or movie, the twin HD tuners to record two shows while watching another.
Then there’s the pausing live TV, rewinding and fast forwarding through ads. Yes, Seven and TiVo have disabled 30 second skipping, but how long will it be before someone hacks their Australian TiVo to re-enable that feature?
Everything else gets hacked, and the TiVo has been hacked in the US. It’ll happen here too, soon enough, surely.
There's some missing bits, but are they deal breakers? Continued on page 2.
