TiVo vs other PVRs

By Stuart Whitmore

In the US, TiVo is one of those brand names that has become a verb. The original Personal Video Recorder (PVR) doesn’t completely dominate the market, but it holds an unrivalled position in the public consciousness. Somewhere in between Hoovering the house and Facebooking their friends, Americans stopped recording shows on their VCRs and began TiVoing them instead.

It’s a phenomenon that’s visible to Australians through dialogue in movies and TV shows (“See the game last night?”; “No, I TiVoed it”), but otherwise TiVo is a largely unknown quantity in Down Under. TiVo does have a big brand name behind it, however: Channel Seven, which has licensed the TiVo platform and is the power behind its local launch. The big question is, however, will Aussies start TiVoing shows too?

TiVo Australia

We’ve had a play with it already (click here to read our review) and think that TiVo has a good chance of succeeding in Australia. That’s partly down to TiVo’s impressive features and partly down to the fact that there’s little in the way of direct competition, with the Australian PVR market fragmented into several different product groups.