Although not currently available in the UK, Tivo is the most feature-rich Digital Video Recorder available. It's so powerful, it is actually more correctly called a Personal Video Recorder. This is due to functions like the Season Pass, which can record every episode of your favourite shows and the Wishlist, which can record shows based on Actor, Director, Category, Keyword or Programme Title. Additionally, the latest models can do all sorts of other things, like sharing your own video content with family and friends and eaily access internet radio and podcast content.
It is my opinion that having this feature-set available NOW on the Virgin Media V+ Box would be a uniqe selling point for the system and thus bring many more people over from other platforms to Cable.
It's very simple. Despite the abundance of DVRs for all platforms that are now available, the Tivo remains the top of the pile feature-wise.
There are a lot of these products on the market, eg Sky+, V+Box and the many different Freeview Playback devices that are about to appear. However, none of them can match the feature-set of Tivo. Here's a closer look at these features.
Finding programmes to record is easy, TiVo provides many different ways to find programmes, and displays both the name and description of the episode, For films a BBFC rating is shown (U, PG, 15 etc) as well as a number of stars to indicate how good it is.
At the heart of TiVo’s radical new management of TV is the Season Pass. Instead of having to set your video to record programmes each day, you simply tell TiVo which programmes you always like to watch. Tell it you like to watch “Friends” on Channel 4, and whenever that programme is broadcast TiVo will record it. Even if the time for the programme changes from one week to the next – TiVo will realise and still record the programme. Next time you are late home from work or shopping, TiVo will have recorded your favourite programmes for you without you having to lift a finger!
Alternatively there's Wishlists. These allow you to find programmes by Actor, Director, Category, Keyword or Programme Title and you can also set these to record matching programmes automatically.
Other features include:
- Live Guide: A transparent guide that overlays whatever is currently on TV. It lists what programmes are currently on each channel.
- Browse by time: Shows what’s on all available channels, or all of your favourite channels at any given time.
- Browse by channel: Shows what’s on a particular channel at a given time.
- Search by title: Enter the title of a programme to quickly find it without having to specify a channel or time.
- Search by genre: Search for programmes of a particular genre, eg all Science fiction programmes, all documentaries about animals etc.
- Inside TiVo / Channel Highlights: Special guides exclusive to TiVo that list the best programmes on for the coming week.
Now, some currently-available DVRs might have some of these features, but only Tivo has all of them. And that's only the Series 1 box that was launched in the UK in 2000.
The current Series 3 units available in the US can do a heck of a lot more including on-line scheduling and Home Media functions.
For further information, here's couple of handy links: On-line Flash Demo | Static info pages
The beauty of it is that all the current TVDrive/V+ boxes could be
updated "over-the-air", meaning no engineer need visit your home and
you won't need a new box.
While the current TVD/V+ Box is a very good product, if you would like to have the added functionality of a Tivo please sign this petition which will be forwarded to Virgin Media in due course.
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