Series 3 Tivo

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You mean they do pick up the next run of a series after a several month break unlike Sky+? Or is it too early to tell as yet?

Presumably no Wishlists or Suggestions though?

 

Damn! Now I'm going to have to emigrate to the States to get one of these. A pity - I like it here and I'm sort of going to miss the dog, the kids and the wife.

 

Too early.

Nope.

Oh, and LOL @ BrianHughes

 

I do crave th'shine.....

 

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want... one...

the cablecard idea is fantastic. OFCOM, are you paying attention??!?!

 

I think that twin tuners is also fine in a single person home. the problem comes with a multi person home.

I have Tivo with its own SKY box on Multiroom, and SKY+ with its twin tuner trickery. The big downfall with SKY+ is that in a multiperson home you can record more than it is possible to watch. Yes it has twin tuners but when you play back a recording you lose the abiliy to watch any live program and because you can only play back one recording at once you can fill the disk twice as fast as you can empty it

I sort of have three tuners anyway as I have another Digibox without a card that can get all the free stuff. Personally I wish I had never bought SKY+, should have bought another TiVo and standard Digibox as I am now effectively trapped by $KY.

My current package includes the movies which gives me SKY+ "for free". A couple of months ago I looked at options for reducing how much I was paying and realised that I am caught by the short and curlies

With 2 sky boxes ( or cable receivers) and 2 Tivos, you can have 4 people each viewing something different, 2 live and 2 recordings.

The "ideal" situation would be a central unit with huge storage that could record upto 4 programs at once and smaller low cost playback only machines that will allow multiple users to view what they want when they want.

BTW. Discovered a new "feature" on SKY+ the other day.... Partial Pause

Came into the room and SWMBO had paused SKY+ whilst on the phone. This was indicated by the huge PAUSE logo in the bottom left corner and the lack of audio. This new "feature" had the video still playing in the background!!! Couldnt repeat this and of course, it hadnt saved anything. Bloody heap of C***

 

Surely the most worthwhile part of SkyMultiRoom was getting them to put in LNBs and splitters and extra wiring that let you watch different things on different boxes in different rooms at once?

Surely after 12 months you can give Sky notice on the Sky+ and downgrade them to running only as standard boxes. Or flog the Sky+ boxes on Ebay and replace them with Freeview Digiboxes where you can record what you want for no extra monthly fee? As you have highlighted you can't actually watch all that you record so surely the answer is not to record as much? Clearly things are heading the central server route but I bet there will be all sorts of horrendous copyright control by then for those solution that means you can't hang on to those programs for more than say 7 or 14 days and if you don't watch them they disappear.

I tried out a Sky+ at a Currys Superstore not long after they came out and that experience (I hated the list of recorded programs being merged/hidden within the EPG) combined with my longstanding allergy to ongoing monthly subscriptions of any kind discouraged me from buying (anyhow we don't have the required wiring on this communal satellite aerial system for Sky+ and gettin it installed would cost me a further 200 quid one off as Sky don't touch communal systems). There was a rumour a while back that Sky would stop charging a sub to use Sky+ but I see it hasn't happened despite the mushrooming sales of Freeview PVRs. Seems that like Easyjet Sky find there are a whole bunch of people out there who will buy a massively over promoted and hyped brand no matter how poor quality or poor value the actual product?

 

Never say NEVER

TiVo is still here remember , they are still supply data here, they still updated the channels for us on the NTL change over, so I wouldnt rule it out totally.

They are still here, just dozing I think and waiting for the whole PVR market to settle down, once it has then I recon they will wake up an launch a real killer machine in the UK that will knock all the others for six.

They have after all got a ready built advertising agency .......US

I recon I could have sold 1000's of the series one but due to the fact TiVo to the untrained looks to be a dead animal in the UK people are very warey
When they return to the UK with a new machine I recon it will be a walk over for them

Fur

 

Only if they market it right

 

I think right now, the thing that would most satisfy me would be some software I could buy from TiVo to install on a PC as a complete replacement operating system.

I built a media centre PC with LCD display, glowing buttons on the remote, twin freeview tuners, large and expandable hard drive capacity. The only thing that lets it down is the crappy Windows MC 05 with it's awkward navigation and how it keeps on recording repeats when I've told it not to!

 

It does seem to be one of Tivo's current blindspots that they only seem to actually think of selling their technology in dedicated tv boxes or partner cable tv company boxes with all the startup manufacturing and marketing costs that then make it difficult to enter a new territory.

Having said that Pugwash I think you are perhaps ahead of your time and that down the road the Microsoft operating system will have evolved to a state where there is a Tivo plug in option and it will do everything you would like. However I also sort of have this terrible feeling that down the road the whole conventional television program as we now know it may also begin to die and be replaced by some sort of interactive multimedia experience.

For the time being its good to know that there's still nothing out there that can properly outshine the tv recording features of my 6 year old Tivo box.

 

I dont know if they will need to really worry toooo much about how its marketed, people on the whole are very much more PVR aware now, with the freeview and $ky+ and media center etc and as Pugwash says Windoze Media Center sucks , half of which is down to Windoze fantastic ability to crash at the most critical moments when was the last time your TiVo crashed ???

Pete I really do hope that mirco$oft dosnt come up with a TiVo plugin to be honest, as that I feel wont do TiVo any favours, why put cracking software onto a (insert your own swear word) opperating system

Fur

 

I was really thinking of when Windows Vista hits the streets as I get the impression that might actually at last be a seriously robust and stable Microsoft operating system, even if not quite as stable as super robust put unfortunately feature poor Linux.

 

Not sure Feature poor is a word I would use, may be not so friendly interface, and certainly you have to be a bit geeky to work your way round it

Certainly from the small amount of work I've done with it, it seems that its a) miles ahead of what windoze can offer and b) a hell of a lot more secure and C) so stable that I have a machine here thats been running a multitude of apps and its been doing that for over a year and never missed a beat

Dont get me wrong I still prefer the windoze environment just dont like the way it has this nasty habit of falling over just when I dont want it to, then being totally non recoverable!!!!!! Linux apps do fall over but I dont think I've ever had one take the machines OS with it

Fur

 

Yes I suppose it was the lack of user friendliness of the Linux environment I was really referring to.

Even without a Cachecard and Tivoweb and a large hard disk size there are ways to crash a Tivo with really excessive Wishlist requests. However with Tivoweb running some very heavy duty apps like Tracker on its fairly puny processor while it is also recording it can now reboot in a variety of circumstances (albeit still comparatively rare and a few days apart). But it always reboots into a state where everything then carries on running and my tv programs keep on recording. Whereas Windows has always had a nasty habit of being able to degenerate into a state where the machine simply hangs but does not realise it and does not reboot itself into a state where normally scheduled activities can then continue.

 

Actually I ran all the cables myself rather than let a SKY destroyer loose on my house. Prior to getting SKY Digital I had a 1m dish with 2 Dual LNB's pointing at Astra 19.2deg and Hotbird 13deg. I could watch anything from either satellite in any room, the only rrestriction being that I could only get one SKY encrypted channel as I only had one card.

The point I was making about multiple recording with single playback is that with several people in the house it becomes impossible to watch all that has been recorded.

*I* could watch everything that *I* record.

The problem is that

*Everyone* cant watch all that has been recorded.

Sadly Freeview isnt an option. I do have several freeview boxes but the chanels I watch the most are Discovery/NatGeo etc and that isnt on Freeview other than limited TopupTV. Also freeview reception here is "iffy" at the best of times. We are officially in a "no reception area" and even normal terrestrial suffers from a huge concrete shopping centre in line of sight.

 

I want a series 3 TiVo, plain and simple.

Now, having a lovely LCD TV, I am beginning to notice the pixelation of my TiVo, which means a trip to the Sky+ I'm afraid - possibly Sky+HD

But.... if a series 3 TiVo were available, I'd go out this afternoon to buy one, regardless of the cost.

I don't think TiVo quite appreciate how much we love these boxes - I could have sold dozens of them over the years, and in fact have sourced at least a dozen from eBay for friends who were amazed by my TiVo.

'Pause Live TV' - oh yeah - that will sell! Whoever thought up that advertising campaign should have been shot.

Better still, give all the Dixons salesmen one to take home with them for two weeks to try out - if they liked it, they could buy it off TiVo at half price - I'd bet they wouldn't have had a single one returned, and they would have instantly developed a veritable army of devotees whose job it was to sell the damn box to people who didn't realise they needed it.

but instead....

'Pause Live TV'

Yeah, right - I know I'm preaching to the converted, but I honestly can't recall the last time I watched Live TV, let alone paused it - that isn't what TiVo is for.

It's a real shame - TiVo is the only piece of consumer electronics that I haven't felt guilty about spending money on - it is the only piece of consumer electronics that I really couldn't live without. It is the easiest piece of kit to use - even my three year old knows how to watch Finding Nemo when he is allowed to.

I'm just annoyed - really annoyed that the only alternative to my Series 1 TiVo is Sky+

 

You are so right on this. I have always thought not having a general Try With No Obligation for 28 Days option (perhaps subject to £400 refundable deposit on your credit card to put off the real time wasters with no money and no intention of ever actually buying) was Tivo's biggest mistake.

Also the box should have had an exciting front display panel showing channel being recorded, names of latest shows available etc. Yes I know it isn't really necessary and drives up the cost of production but this kind of stuff markets the product and makes people impulse buy.

But did they enter into any deals with OnDigital or NTL or Teleworst to market it to their customers at a time when they had no PVRs of their own. Did they hell.

Also I would have let the Dixons/Currys salesmen have one without making them pay up for at least 6 months. By that time they would have been hooked for life.

Just a huge missed opportunity.

 

Really? So I presume by that analogy then, that when DVD players launched, they failed to take off because there was no "Try With No Obligation" option? And can we expect the same with HDDVD players launching soon ? Oh - and I guess the PS3 will flunk as well ?

That was not the cause of TiVo not taking off in the UK. The technology was new, and the concept was something akin to computers - taking about hard drives etc etc. The technology was too new to make it into the homes of those who would benefit.

Now Sky have done the job properly there's possibly a chance of a return. "Like Sky+ ... only better". Personally, I'd think the ASA might have something to say about that though

 

Okay, smart-arse. What does a DVD recorder do? Like VCR only better quality. What does a PS3 do? Like a PS/2 only better. Now, without knowing anything about it, what does a Tivo do? The name doesn't give anything away!

My point is that you know what a DVD Recorder does and you can probably guess what a PS3 will do. However, at the time (and even now) it is very difficult to describe what a Tivo does and explain the benefits, with only words.

"It records TV shows"
"Really. My VCR can do that and it's 20 years old"

So, rather than trying to explain it, if you sit someone in-front of a Tivo and show them, or in this case give them one to play with for a month, they'll soon see what it does and how indespensible it is.

That's how I talked my parents into buying one, anyway