News Ltd slams TiVo and talks up Foxtel in article

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 02 July 2008 15:37

Opinion and Analysis

One point the article makes is that the TiVo box does require the user to have a broadband connection, while the Foxtel IQ2 doesn’t.

That is a valid point that will stop some households from being able to use a TiVo even if they bought one, but with many households now having broadband as standard, it’s much less of an issue that Foxtel might want us all to believe.

The Courier Mail article then makes the point that “content could be a deciding factor” in whether Foxtel or TiVo wins the day.

It uses the examples of VHS vs Beta and Blu-ray vs HD DVD. But while Foxtel has vastly more channels available than free-to-air TV, who hasn’t heard the refrain of “so many channels but nothing to watch?”

Free-to-air TV in Australia is still where all the big prime-time hits from the US and locally are shown on Australian TV, and those same shows are the ones that can get million-plus or better national viewer numbers for individual shows, far outweighing the number of viewers Foxtel has ever had for any individual program.

So while Foxtel wins on the quantity side of the content equation, when it comes to prime time hits, free-to-air still wins on the quality side of the content equation. That’s not to say there isn’t a lot of very high quality content on Foxtel – there most certainly is.

Channels like Discovery, Animal Planet, the History Channel and more are all highly regarded stations with programming generally not available on free-to-air. So Foxtel definitely wins there.

The Courier Mail article seems imply that this is the be all and end all when it states that the Foxtel IQ2 box not only has free-to-air TV recording, but 14,000 hours of monthly content, and that the TiVo can only record existing free-to-air channels and “their digital offshoots” with any Internet channels still to come in the future.

But that ignores the fact that the TiVo’s user interface and ‘Season Pass’ features to easily record all shows in a series, similar shows and more are heavily lauded features in the US that sees the TiVo remain enormously popular over there.

My own advice to Foxtel is to spend more time closely copying TiVo’s software features for its own IQ2 box, especially now that the TiVo is here to provide some real competition at last, even if the content selection is smaller on free-to-air than it is on pay TV.