Australian TiVo online scheduling delayed

Adam Turner
Tuesday, 29 July 2008 04:13

Opinion and Analysis

TiVo officially hits the Australian shelves today without online scheduling, but my list of frustrations goes on.
I say "today", but Harvey Norman has made a mockery of the July 29 launch date as you've been able buy a TiVo from some HN stores for several weeks. As such there are already plenty of Australian TiVos already out in the wild.

It's hard to believe that TiVo still hasn't got the online scheduling up and running. Considering many people have already dismissed the Australian TiVo as hobbled, you think they'd try to have one of the few advanced features up and running on the launch date. I'm now told it should be available by "the end of next week". I've been hassling TiVo about this for a week and they've been less than helpful. The experience leaves me concerned that TiVo might have little more respect for its customers than the contempt Seven has for its viewers.

As I said in my initial look at the Australian TiVo , so far I've been very impressed in terms of its core PVR features. Clearly the 160 GB hard drive is too small for serious PVR users, but it's enough for mums 'n' dads who just want to keep up with the week's viewing. There's certainly not enough room to archive old recordings, which I suspect is a deliberate ploy on Seven's part - the network which is backing TiVo in Australia. Thankfully there are already reports of Australians successfully dropping bigger drives into the new TiVos.

I'm not counting the small hard drive in my Top 10 list of Australian TiVo frustrations, because I decided to limit the list to things TiVo's masters could actually fix via a firmware update. When it comes to core PVR features, I'd say TiVo is the best recorder available in Australia. Even so there is room for improvement. You can tell from my comments that I'm a Windows Media Centre user, because many of my frustrations with TiVo revolve around features that I miss since switching from my bipolar Vista Media Centre. I've listed my complaints roughly in order from least to most frustrating.

10. No thumbnails on recordings list

TiVo's list of recorded shows is exactly that, a list of program titles with nothing else but coloured icons to indicated whether they're currently recording or if they're scheduled to be deleted soon. You can only see eight titles on the screen at once. Thumbnails serve no practical purpose, but I like them. I really miss the grid layout on my media centre, showing 15 thumbnails, but I do like the fact that TiVo groups season passes into folders, with the most recently recorded at the top of the list.

9. Can't use the onscreen display to flick through EPG

Call it quasi channel surfing, but I like calling up the onscreen display and flicking through what's on the other channels without actually changing channel. Most PVRs offer this simple feature and I don't see why TiVo can't, although it would be hampered by the fact the OSD covers most of the screen.

8. No picture in picture

The ability to watch a second channel in a small window in the corner can be really useful, especially if you're trying to keep one eye on sport while watching a movie. Yes, I know Vista Media Centre lacks this feature - as do many other PVRs, but it's a handy one to have and I'm surprised TiVo lacks it.

7. No warning against changing the channel when time shifting

This is my pet peeve with all PVRs. 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 lost and you're thrown forward to the present with no way of getting that five minutes back. 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.

6. Can't limit a Season Pass to episodes screening at a particular time of day

With the TiVo's small hard drive, you need to ensure you don't waste recording space. The menus offer the option of recording "first run only", but this doesn't help if every showing is a repeat and you're trying to distinguish between recent repeats and ancient repeats (think about how Ten milks The Simpsons). Like with a Windows Media Centre, sometimes I want to narrow the recording options down to only record episodes screening at a particular time of day.

Some of these points might seem like nit-picking, but if you encounter them every day they quickly become annoying. My remaining five Australian TiVo frustrations are more significant. CONTINUED