The Age is reporting that at long last TiVo is coming to Australia:

Seven's long-awaited TiVo digital television recorder will go on sale in Australia next month, priced at $700.

Harvey Norman will sell the device exclusively for three months, after which it will be sold via all major electronics chains including JB Hi-Fi and Dick Smith, The Australian Financial Review reported.

Interesting to see how this competes with other options; I would guess for $700 you could buy the best part of a (headless) media box to do PVR duties for you and you'd get much better control over it.

Theres nothing decent to watch on 7 / TV anyway....why would I want to rewind and fastforward it?

$700 would buy a pretty damn good HTPC which would be able to playback full 1080P movies, as well as acting as a PVR.

Also, there's nothing worth recording on FTA anyway.

could it be used with digital forxtel? that would be okay i guess

Doesn't IQ (or whatever) do something similar already for foxtel tho?

^^ doesnt foxtel have iq already ^^ which is effectively tivo

Yes

Click on the link and read more about why its not IQ if you care

Been looking into this stuff, I'm dissatisfied with a media centre PC (its really just a normal PC I've bludgeoned into service). I just don't like using a mouse & keyboard on the lounge. To get the functionality I want from a media centre PC I am going to have to go beserk with video cards, PC remotes, quality TV receiver, new OS, audio cards, and I'm still gonna end up with a PC in my lounge room.

I think I'm gonna buy a DVICO or similar instead, and hook it up to my new 3TB NAS.

Why not get an IR port for your HTPC so you dont need to use a mouse+keyboard?

HTPC+MYTHV+IR = Winnah

really hoggy?

i feel extremely comfortable with the cordless mouse/keyboard in the lounge room:

i have a nice big drawer in the coffee table so i can put it away when we have important guests coming round or theres kids that are likely to play with it:

i like to surf intarwebs in the living room as well, if the inlaws are staying over:

i work out there occaisionly when i get a call at nite too, so keyboard and mouse stays at our place:

Yeh maybe I need to refine my setup a bit. But I have to pretty much replace half the system to get up it up par, the sound card is borrocks, the tv tuner card sucks, need a remote etc etc etc.

It also uses heaps of power sitting there all day maintaining my ratios!

A nice shiny little device that sits in the TV cabinet out of the way and plays my medias just sounds so dreamy...

Voting for HTPC, get a remote for it if you only want it to run as a media pc. Just set up mine to use digital audio out through a home theatre setup for surround sound. Mythtv is pretty good if you know anything about linux and dont mind spending the time to set it up. Others can probably give more info about their windows media centre setups.

Also, there's nothing worth recording on FTA anyway.

Agreed. FTA in AU sucks. I hardly ever watched it, except for maybe some doco on ABC, SBS.

If you have kids its a different matter altogether!

Peep and Chirp is the height of entertainment when you're four!

Bump!
So apparently TiVo will offer downloadable movies!! Interesting! Perhaps this will prompt channel 10/9 to start to offer catch up and all that jazz.

link

Interesting that they bypasseed Unwired/Engin and will be using Internode for the broadband connection.

I don't think this really affects TV networks at all. Obviously its 7 who are doing most of this, since they're the ones who own TiVo, but 9 & 10 dont' have any reason to change their systems.

9 have an online "Catch Up TV" service thats hopeless, and I believe 10 is pretty similar.

Apparently, ABC have said they'd like to see i-View on TiVo

so now we can record crap and watch at our convenience. niccce.

last edited by infi at 15:01:03 09/Mar/09

So you have to buy the Tivo box, you then have to pay between $80 and $100 a month for a subscription to the service, then you still have to pay when you want to watch a movie on demand? Sounds like a bit of a bum deal to me. How, in any conceiveable way, is that going to discourage piracy.

I wont be happy until Australia has some sort of service like Vudu in the States.

Which will never happen.

we bought a tivo a few months ago, decent little system although they should stick a cd/dvd/blueray reader in it imo

Paying for free to air TV was never so cheap.

f*** spending that much and not getting anymore channels!

last edited by 3dee at 15:58:08 09/Mar/09

I love this idea of 100 free online channels. Unless it's unmetered content or you have a huge cap (100gigs+) this is going to be useless.

its unmetered on internode

dohh beaten.... yes the content is unmetred on internode
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1157921

Whats the quality of picture like ?
Are they HD ? SD ?
I like Foxtel coz i dont saturate my Net Connection DL shows.
I cant imagine you will be doing much gaming while your waiting... waiting... waiting... for you TV shows to DL. AND PAYING FOR THEM.

I never bothered with IQ for Foxtel.
Its pretty rare you miss something on Foxtel and never see it again.
Theres usually something watchable on.

The other interesting thing with this is Channel Seven is partnering with internode to offer connections through a TiVo box and is providing 100 movies for each subscriber to download.

I see they also mention ads.
I wonder if these TiVO movies dont allow add skipping ?

wtf? I've seen tivo stuff for sale in harvey normans for ages what's the difference with this one?

I wonder if these TiVO movies dont allow add skipping ?

I think the old ones allowed 2x play speed or something. I like my PVR, it's got something stupid like 2600x fast forward. I click that s*** and in about 3 seconds I've skipped an entire 3 hour movie and got to start agian haha. Who would want a fast forward that fast?

I wonder if these TiVO movies dont allow add skipping ?

The article I linked said that it does allow fast forwarding!

I'm sure hardware geeks are already making the necessary modifications that consumers want.