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interactive
recording the future
Does the departure of TiVo mean the death of Personal Video Recorders? Or has someone just pressed ‘pause’? Ceri Thomas looks at the state of play.
They said that the old order was about to be swept away. They said that everything was about to change.
What are we talking about? Well, the Personal Video Recorder revolution, of course. Those little black boxes that were going to free us forever from the tyranny
of TV schedules.
They were going to let us watch whatever we wanted
whenever we wanted to, would record every episode of our favourite programme, would find new programmes for us to enjoy and would mean that we’d never have to sit through another ad break again.
They would, in short, change our viewing habits forever.
When the TiVo system launched in the UK in October 2000, those were the kind of
ideas being bandied about by an excitable media and a crowd of even more excitable early adopters. Their happiness only increased when the similar Sky+ system came onto the market two years later.
But in February of this year, TiVo pulled out of the UK market, hav- ing failed to garner the kind of interest they confidently predict- ed three years before. Did this mark the beginning of the end for PVR systems or is it just a blip on the road to an inevitable future?
Now, since part of the reason that TiVo left the UK seems to have been a lack of public awareness about what they had to offer, perhaps we’d better explain just what a PVR is and what it does.
Personal Video Recorders are to VHS recorders what, claim their most ardent enthusiasts, the motor car was to the horse-and-cart. Operating like the hard disc of a computer, PVRs directly record the digital signal coming in through your cable, satellite dish or aerial so their first advantage is in the quality of the image they store. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
A PVR owner using a service like Sky+ or TiVo (the boxes them- selves cost a few hundred pounds, but you also need to pay an additional monthly subscrip- tion fee) could do so much more.
For a start they could pause or rewind live television shows while still actually watching them - the PVR continuing to record the rest while allowing users to review what it’s already commit- ed to memory.
This “timeshifting” allowed viewers to treat movies, soaps, documentaries and even sport- ing events like pre-recorded videos, halting them whenever they needed to pop out for a cuppa or rewind them to catch a replay of a vital bit of action.
Most PVRs have a degree of programmability built in too.
What’s that boil down to? At its simplest, it means that if you’ve got a hankering never to miss an episode of Friends ever again then all you have to do is tell the gizmo to simply record every new one as it comes on.
It’s such a basic function that James Soames of Sky+’s New Product Development depart- ment reckons new users of Sky+ (which operates through the already existing onscreen Sky pro- gramme guide) will be “setting up series links within five minutes of starting to use the system.”
TiVO went even further, actually possessing the ability to draw up a profile of your viewing habits and “learn the types of programmes that you love and then record them automatically,” said TiVo’s Vice president Andrew Cresci.
So for instance if you regularly used the box to record US sitcoms and a new one cropped up on a cable channel you didn’t normal- ly watch, then the TiVO box might have recorded an episode for you just in case.
It sounds fantastic, but for some reason TiVo simply never caught on over here. They might have 510,000 subscriptions world- wide (predominately in the US), but they’re estimated to have only managed to pull in 35,000 UK subscribers.
Now you could take that as an indication that PVR systems are ultimately doomed in the UK. Maybe we all like the way we watch TV at the moment? Maybe we just don’t want change? Or then again maybe TiVo’s decision to pull out represents a lost battle rather than a lost war.
The one thing which makes that look likely is the relative suc- cess of the Sky+ system. “We launched Sky+ at the end of August 2001,” says Soames, “And at the last report our subscriber numbers were 38,000. And we have ambitions to get that up to 100,000 by the end of June 2003.”
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