Incomplete Gamer

Posts Tagged ‘Tivo’

What would you you do for a free TiVo? The good folks at the corporate home of Tivo Australia are banking on you doing quite a bit.  They’ve got  5 TiVo Media Devices up for grabs in their Easter Hunt challenge which runs from Easter Monday through until Friday the 24th of April.

You’ll be glad of those twelve days when you see what they’d like you to do.  There are seven (a clever Channel 7 tie in?) challenges in all.  Three are fairly painless – click to a website as directed and snap a picture of yourself and the desired image.  Two challenges will require you to drag yourself off the couch and into a video store and a TiVo retailer to take another two photos as directed.  Challenge Six will have you and as many of your friends as possible dressing up head to toe in one of the six TiVo colours for another photo opportunity.

At this point, you might be thinking, “Well it’s all seems a lot of bother to go to, but at least I don’t have to come up with twenty five words expressing my undying love of all things TiVo.”

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The Australian TiVo website is up and running and in less than two days TiVo makes an in-store appearance at your friendly neighbourhood Harvey Norman. The Incomplete Gamer hopes they’ve built a golden shrine to TiVo in each and every store: a raised rotating dais, complete with sexy smiling Sale of the Century models, gifting plush TiVo dolls, TiVo Beach towels and TiVo Slippers to everyone who passes; all the while extolling the virtues of TiVo – the god of Digital Video Recording.

The reality we fear, will be something far less compelling. The way we see it, TiVo in-store demonstrations just don’t work.

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Two days post launch and the dust has begun to settle. At the risk of having to rename the site The Incomplete TiVo (TM Pending) , we’re posting another TiVo item for your reading pleasure.

Now the TiVo critics would argue that TiVo and Seven barely raised any dust when they launched the TiVo on Monday. Certainly tech blog Gizmodo didn’t bother hiding its lack of excitement when it posted it’s coverage: TiVo Gets Announced… Does Anybody Care? Apparently not if the Gizmodo readership (or more accurately the ones willing to post) are any indication, however as one dissenting pro-TiVo poster, Ben Anderson noted “TiVo was never intended for the tech-minded on a gadget website”.

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Fans of sitcoms and procedural crime drama were treated this week to a cross over double act with a difference featuring CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (8:30pm, Sunday 29th June, Channel Nine) and Two and a Half Men (Tuesday, 8:30pm, 1 July, Channel Nine).

So was this stunt TV or was it an an original cross over concept that breathed fresh life into two tired television genres? Today The Incomplete Gamer stopped writing about Tivo long enough to pick up the peanut remote and find out for ourselves.

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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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It’s coming. Seven promised Australia that Tivo would launch ahead of the Beijing Olympics and that’s precisely the plan according to recent reports, although at this rate it looks like Tivo might be taking up it’s position on the starting blocks Harvey Norman shelves, not much before the Opening Ceremony commences. The Gadget Guy reports that online sales will commence on July 15, followed by in-store sales commencing July 28. We’ll know more come the official launch this Tuesday according to the good folks at Hydrapinion.

The big question of course, is not so much when it will launch, but rather should you join the ranks of the early adopters and take up your place in the front the Tivo lovers queue at your local HN Superstore? Today, The Incomplete Gamer gives you ‘Ten Reasons to Skip Next Months Tivo Launch in Australia’. Tune in Monday and we’ll argue the affirmative with ‘Ten Reasons to be First in Line’.

‘Ten Reasons to Skip Next Months Tivo Launch in Australia’

1: Sticker Shock.

Forget 1 Reason. Try 700. With a rumoured RRP of $700, at first glance the Australian HD Tivo is not quite the bargain its US cousin is. Stateside, the HD Tivo is currently selling on Amazon for only US$229.97. However Tivo comes to Australia with no ongoing subscription fees. Tivo offers the same deal in the US in the guise of ‘Product Lifetime Service‘ which will currently set you back a further US$399. Total damage for the US version converted into Aussie dollars – A$656.26. The good news then is that for once we’re not a victim of price gouging. The bad news…we’re still facing a steep admission price. While charging on-going subscription fees would have been a hard sell in the Australian market for a Tivo boasting only free-to-air content recording capabilities, the up-side of such a pricing model would have meant a lower priced HD Tivo.

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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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The Incomplete Gamer loves Tivo; unashamedly, unreservedly, absolutely. Even when the hard drive gremlin turns her pretty features a nasty shade of ‘Green Screen of Death’, and she goes into an endless reboot loop, taking three months worth of Scrubs, Law & Order and Wilfred to the Tivo grave.

Tivo’s built a reputation on three features. It boasts, what is quite possibly the world’s most user-friendly interface. Not only is the UI intuitive, it’s incredibly powerful as well. Combine those features with a reputation for reliability and you have one solid Hard Disc Recorder.

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