Will there ever be new Tivos in the UK? I look at the US Tivos and drool! Telewest are offering something to challenge Sky+ ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4194357.stm ) so maybe this will start some competition and Tivo will start production again? Heres hoping

Was it ever alive in the UK in the first place?

I know somebody who's had a TIVO for over 2 years and hasn't even turned it on once!

If I were going for a PVR like device, I'd probably go for SKY plus - because you're recording the stream rather than re-encoding, and yes, I'm aware of the "crippled" nature of plus (like if you stop subscribing to the channel which you have a recording of, you can no longer playback the recording).

For TIVO like operation, MythTV seems the way to go and has the added bonus that no subscription is required for listings.

It looks like Sky have suddenly doubled the bit rate on channels like Sky One and Sky Mix this week. This is a welcome change in one way, a 8mbit/s picture looks nearly as good as DVD, but it does mean I'll have to think about upgrading my 40GB Sky+ disk at some point.

I think Sky have sewn up the multi-channel DVR market in the UK. Companies like Humax make DVRs for Freeview but most people who want a proper multichannel system invariably go for Sky. In the dozen or so places I've lived over the years only one place had cable available so I don't count that as an option.

Sky want to push Sky+ so they will never let Tivo into the satellite DVR market. Even in the US it sounds like DirecTV are trying to end their relationship with Tivo. I don't even think Tivo would make a mark in the Freeview market because most people have Freeview so they don't pay a monthly subscription which to me, sounds like Tivo's income stream. Besides Humax has a significant head start and they're also pretty cheap.

It was fairly obvious to me that Tivo was never going to get anywhere in the UK when at launch they were forced to use Sky as their hardware support agent in the UK (and it looks like they still do). It is a shame, I would rather have a Tivo than a Sky+ box.

Yea, it is such as shame Tivo is almost dead here in the UK.

I am currently putting my AV system back together and have left the Tivo out of the picture at the moment, the loss of picture quality is just too great for it to be an option in the living room. For the past few years I have used a Sony Portable, so now I have a living room to watch my bigger TV in I have suddenly noticed the quality issue.

If Tivo did a box with an inbuilt freeview tuner that would be enough to get them a fair market share. I'm not a fan of Sky+ but with the Tivo lacking in new features it is looking like one of the only solutions there will be in the future.

What I can't understand is why Sky didn't jump on Tivo from the start and offer it instead of Sky+, a customer Sky Digibox/Tivo would have been the perfect solution and would have sparked off the interest that Tivo needs to get a foothold in the market place. Ah well...

Cheers

Cris.

Imagine a world where every Digibox had Tivo on, now that would have been cool!

I personally hate the Sky UI, I find it difficult to navigate, and I hate the fact the Sky Guide doesn't default to the channel I am watching, it always starts at the top, this means you can't flick down the list, see something you like, have a look, change your mind and continue in the list.

I am also spolit with Tivo, when it was set up I used the WAP interface loads of times to set recordings I had missed out, and all from my mobile phone! The web interface is kinda cool too, you can delte things really quickly and setup recordings without the restirctions of the UI.

Why is it the best ideas are not always the ones that go on to be the market leaders?

Cheers

Cris.

Canada has a much bigger potential market for TiVo and much cheaper rates for Guide data from TMS - TiVo aren't interested. I suspect their only reason for entering the UK was because of Sky. Though i don't know the details of the relationship, so I can't really offer any detailed opinion.

TiVo is about to get the bitch-slap of the century in North America, so I think they need to focus all their energy on staying alive, let alone trying to expand into small markets. They'll be completely shut out of the North American satellite industry and completely shut out of the CableCo-branded boxes. I've mentioned elsewhere, their only hope seems to be Cable-Card/OpenCable (alowing compatibility with multiple cable systems by using a CAM like for satellite service). But their "service" business model is going to look even more tired in the future. New boxes with software by other vendors like NDS and Digeo are also making TiVo's limited features seem rather out-dated.

Market data says they have about 2 million of the five (to six) million DVRs in the US. At least half of those are DirecTV boxes. DirecTV is about to start offering their own NDS box and you can believe they'll stop promoting and selling TiVo-equipped hardware. The NDS boxes offer a lot of features that will capture many new subscribers - TiVo doesn't have anything to compete (and will likely be locked out anyway - their DirecTV contract ends in 2007).

They were the pioneer, but seriously, they haven't innovated or significantly improved their platform in a number of years. They also didn't make the right deals when the opportunities came up. They still have their name, which is practically a synonym for DVR, but most consumers can't tell the difference, buying any box as a "TiVo"

On the PC-software front, if you're an ubber geek and like tweaking for hundreds of man hours and are interested in spending many more in Photoshop making graphics, MythTV might be an alternative. If you're just a normal computer user, or a consumer, then it's just over-hyped and clunky software that doesn't hold a light to the features nor simplicity of TiVo. Sure it's "free" -at least there's no service fees - the hardware required is far more costlier than any TiVo.

It's all very unfortunate, but it's reality. This isn't exactly the empeg scenario if anyone was thinking of drawing a parallel. In this case there are a lot of other solutions being developed and coming to market. And many f them with far more features than TiVo and with as much, or more eye candy.

Bruno

Quote:


Market data says they have about 2 million of the five (to six) million DVRs in the US. At least half of those are DirecTV boxes. DirecTV is about to start offering their own NDS box and you can believe they'll stop promoting and selling TiVo-equipped hardware. The NDS boxes offer a lot of features that will capture many new subscribers - TiVo doesn't have anything to compete (and will likely be locked out anyway - their DirecTV contract ends in 2007).

Yeah but how many of the direct tv subscribers got direct tv just for the dual tuner tivo. I am probably in the minority but that was the only reason I even considered getting direct tv.

The NDS box offers a lot more than two tuners. They'll capture all the TiVo users that are not religeous about the TiVo brand and capture many more that will jump to DirecTV for the samme reason you did (box/service features).

DirecTV subscription numbers are up recently.

Bruno

I have a feeling the PVR market will be like the car mp3 player market has been. There will be many but no one will do it they way I want so I will have to keep using the tivo forever.

I agree with you about the Sky UI, I find it really restrictive. I would love to have simple thing like a single channel programme list when the time slots are listed vertically down the screen.

However, my Mum can use it. This is a minor miracle as she refuses to believe that she can operate anything "technical", yet she managed to get the hang of a Sky digibox without much help from me.

The Sky+ remote is also the most intuitive I have ever used. I can always find any button without looking at the remote. I don't know why it is so good, it just is (I think it might be to do with the combination of different shapes and sizes of the buttons).

Am I the only here that loves my TiVo? It is perfect for me as it works with cable. I've had it for over 4 years now and it has shared my journey into 3 homes. The first having sky, the second analogue cable and the third digital cable. I do wish it had twin decoders like Sky+ but sometimes it is a blessing that it doesn't. We record enough as it is. We very rarely have to endure live TV.

I paid for a lifetime subscription up-front which was a great decision seeing as how long I have had it

Picture quality is fine on mine. If only I could merge it with the xBox and the cable box it would be perfect.

Weren't Sony and Philips talking of DVD players with HDD and TiVo functionality?

I love my Tivo too, but being a sucker for new gadgets I went for the tenner-a-month option, suspecting that I'd have got the latest, greatest tivo box when it came out. It didn't, so they've probably had 500 quid out of me so far, plus 400 for the tivo originally....

I only have the 5 channels of terrestrial and it records plenty for me to keep up with.

ISTR there are Pioneer(?) combined DVD-Burner/Tivo units in the US, just none in the UK.

Hugo

I hate to say it, but the more I'm reading about the NDS box, the more I'm thinking that it isn't worth hacking my DTivo to run 4.0 for the HMO option. It all comes down to the UI. I can go on and on about how nice it is to be able to hack the Tivo, but the only "hack" I've done to mine is adding another hard drive. And the only other "hack" I'm looking at door would just be giving the Tivo features that other players will already have. I guess the TivoWeb's ability to burn DVD's on my PC is the only thing that the NDS box seems to be lacking.

Another odd thing about the NDS box is that you'll basically have just one in your home. It will have 4 tuners (or more?) and will record in MPEG4 to get more use out of the hard drive. Apparently, DirecTV is launching new satellites to gradually move to MPEG4. Then, around the rest of your home, you will have "video terminals" that will have no built-in hard drive, but will be able to stream video from the main box over a fast ethernet (initially) or wireless (eventually) connection. The advantage to this would be far less coaxial cable running around the home. Music and photo sharing will be supported too.

It also appears that the main box will support HDTV whereas the terminals will only be SD at first. The theroy being that most people have one HDTV in their main viewing area and SD sets around the rest of the house. HD terminals will come later (but may require giga-ethernet?).

I guess the boxes will also be both MPEG2 and MPEG4 since these boxes will also be able to record HDTV broadcasts over the air. Toss a good UI and I'm sold! (Oh yeah, I want to be able to burn those Tori Amos appearances to DVD for my wife too).

They say this stuff will be coming to the US as soon as this year (which means summer of next year I bet). Does NDS already have a presence in the UK? Do you guys have any feedback on it? Is there any news that you too may be the same equipment? Is there any MPEG4 satellite in the UK?

[quoteISTR there are Pioneer(?) combined DVD-Burner/Tivo units in the US, just none in the UK.


Yep, there may be other models too. My brother-in-law has one and it's great. I've even used it to convert VHS tapes to DVD. It works seemlessly with the Tivo software (actually, it's PART of the Tivo software). It will even let you rip DVD's to the HD, but it goes through a converstion process and the "highest" setting seems to take up more room than the original DVD. He says it's good for when he wants to rent a few DVDs but doesn't have time to watch them all. Once the DVD's are on your hard drive, it won't let you burn them to another DVD however.

I agree with you on the wireless thing. The more devices you have, the more trouble you have too! But tha'ts another topic.

Murdoch has only owned DirecTV for a very short time and I'm sure the merger/borging hasn't really gotten underway so that's why I was asking for experiences on your end. Except for Fox Television, he really has had no influence on the US market until now.

Well... Going by how the Sky Digital boxes work here, anything designed by NDS will be locked down tight. Sky+ PVRs won't let you extract video and as pointed out, the stream is stored encrypted and only decrypted when you watch it. Sky/NDS won't release a CAM (Conditional Access Module) which supports the Videoguard encryption system so you're stuck with the Digiboxes they sell. You can't for example record directly to a PC using a DVB card. I'm assuming this is because they're worried it's a possible avenue for attack and copying.

Contraversally, the Sky+ boxes have the ability to disable fast forwarding during certain segments of a stream. People are worried that one day they'll wake up and find out that you can't fast forward through the adverts anymore. Alledgely they said they won't turn on this feature.

If you're happy to be the generic consumer and do exactly what they tell you to then it'll be fine. If you want to do anything different then expect serious obstacles.

Interesting how NDS and DirecTV already have a habit of taking one another to court!

More interesting is that the NDS/DireTV boxes were also public knowledge at the same time, months before CES.

I've known about the NDS box for about a year. And saw screen shots last summer sometime - they were on NDS' web site. Well before that November article was written. Can't remember where I first saw it mentioned. Might have been in one of the DirecTV or TiVo forums somewhere.

Bruno

There is some hope for non-Sky subscribers though - if ITV dump Sky on digital satellite and just pay the EPG fees then Ch4 and Ch5 will follow, then there might be a market for an FTA hard drive recorder.

ITV renewed it's contract for an extra two months recently to continue negotiations but it seems likely that they will go free-to-air but with channels tailored to a card holder's region. The viewer will need to buy a card for a one-off fee and register their address, if they don't they will get ITV London. They recently complained to Ofcom about the fees that Sky wanted to charge, I guess they wanted more than they charged the BBC for a similar service.

The main problem is that people still think dish=not free, we have several Sky receivers in the house which are used without subscriptions and 99% of people have no idea that it is possible. However because the systems are free when you subscribe this means that quite often when people get cable TV they put their old system in the paper for £20 and don't realise that they are still quite sought after.

Gareth

I've got so used to the extra channels now, going back to just the FTA ones would be a shock (even with ITV1 and C4).

I installed a Sky box with no subscription for my mum, she gets hours of entertainement from the shopping channels

Oh well if QVC is your bag then you're sorted irrespective of chosen platform.

Holy thread revival.....

Having had virginmedias TiVo box (well 2 of them in our house) for the best part of 6 months, I have to wonder how come they're so revered?

The UI is clumsy at best, it's awkward to navigate full of superfluous button presses. It never seems to remember things, like if I press guide then I expect to be presented with the guide page centred around the channel i'm watching, not back at the start of the list.

If I stop a recording from playing I expect it to resume from where I left off, not from the start.

It really doesn't seem that well thought out or particularly polished.

That said, I do actually like it, usability issues aside its pretty good, the suggestions are things that it does do well. Virgin do actually seem to be applying pressure onto TiVo, because it would appear that long standing gripes & issues that people have had no success in getting fixed across the Atlantic are now being remedied.

And the killer usability feature is the iPad app, infact most of my gripes with the UI disseapear when using it because it's so fluid and natural to use, it's everything that the UI on the box isn't!

A few more updates and I think it'll be a killer system.

Adrian

Well, you probably won't find a lot of people exclaiming TiVo's virtues any more. Most PVRs have come a long way since they first started eating TiVo's lunch.

That said, none of the problems you describe have existed on any of my TiVos back to when they were first launched.

Taking a quick look at the Virgin Media web site, it looks like the one you have has the UI of the US TiVo Premiere, which hasn't gotten good reviews, though mostly due to underpowered hardware rather than actual problems like you're describing. However, part of the complaints have been about the new UI being clumsy. It's the first real UI update since TiVo launched, and it sounds like it didn't go all that well.

Basically what I'm saying is that TiVo built up a lot of good will by having a really robust, well made device, then squandered that through glacial updates and a poor version 2.

Wow, I would never say that about the Tivo experience I've had for the last 10-12 years. "Superfluous button presses" is not a phrase that's computing with me right now when I think of Tivo. Aside from up/down or selecting a folder of recordings (which is necessary for any DVR), I can play a recorded show in two button presses.


As Bitt said, this does not describe my experience. It's not really a case of "remembering," the guide just starts with the channel you're watching and you go up and down from there.


Again, I've never seen this happen on any of the Tivos I've owned. The only case in which it happens is if the playback is near the very end of a recording (like the last 5%) and you leave it without choosing to delete the recording. In every other case it remembers the playback. I could go into my Now Playing List, start every recording in there, and stop them half way through, and it would remember the playback position of each recording.


I would love to see a video of what you're talking about, because that's the opposite of how I'd describe Tivo. Tivo has always been the alternative to poorly polished provider DVRs.



You can find me, and I don't think I'm in a minority.


They have come a long way, and they still eat Tivo's lunch, and Tivo still suffers from people calling those boxes "Tivos," but that doesn't mean they've caught up. My mother has the Fios DVR, which is better than most (not as good as DirecTV though). That interface is clunky, the remote is clunkier, and the whole system is just slow. For example, when I fast forward through a commercial on Tivo and I see the show come back on, when I press play Tivo jumps back a few seconds so you don't miss the start. On her DVR it just starts where you press play. This is a basic thing that a DVR needs to have.


Ah my apologies, my earlier statements about the interface may not apply to the new version. But given the buttons on my remote, I assume it's just as easy to start a recording.


I can't argue with that. Tivo perfected the interface for the DVR in ~2001, and didn't do a thing to it for 10 years. I think it baffled every Series 3 and TivoHD owner that the freaking menus weren't even updated to be HD. Even now, my little Tivo guy is sitting at the top of my Tivo menus looking low-res and squat. It's odd.

BTW, I'm hoping to get my Tivo Premiere Elite soon. Clearly I'm a Tivo fan