Posts Tagged ‘Electronic Program Guide’

If you graced us with your presence over the last few days you might have stumbled across our last post – Ten Reasons to Skip Tivo’s Aussie launch. In the interest of fairness, and with less than a day until all is revealed, The Incomplete Gamer brings you Ten Reasons to forget everything we told you before. Some might call that fickle. We like to think of it as balanced coverage.

1. It just works. While we praise and recommend Tivo with an almost missionary zeal, all the while basking in the warmth of its technological wizardry; our two Series 1 Tivo units quietly go about their business recording our favourite shows and listing them for our viewing pleasure on the ‘Now Showing’ screen. Tivo is our best friend, no doubt about it, but it’s the end result – the recordings – that capture our hearts and minds. Like a kettle that boils water or a toaster that toasts, Tivo is a product that does what it was engineered to do but, in the case of Tivo, in an intuitive, reliable and intelligent fashion that very few products, past or present, have managed.

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The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Tivo is readying to launch in Oz with a keenly-priced subscription deal. How keenly priced? How does free sound? Sure, there’s no such thing as a free HD PVR, and the price of the recorder is likely to be a little higher than it might have been, had the Tivo/Channel Seven/Unwired consortium been able to sign you up to an on-going monthly subscription to access the Electronic Program Guide.

Now, the epg is the life blood of the Tivo (and any other DVR for that matter). Without it, it’s only slightly more useful than a doorstop. Sure, you’ll have great picture quality, but you’ll be managing your recordings as effectively as your old VCR could manage, which is to say not at all. The epg was something any Tivo buyer would have had to pony up for no matter how reluctantly. Without it, the whole purchase would be a little pointless. Yet it was always going to be a hard sell. Sure Foxtel charge an on-going subscription, but you do however get additional programming above and beyond the offerings of the free to air broadcasters.

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