First Look: TiVo HD, no ad-skipping but you'll still want one

Adam Turner | Aug 29, 2008 4:59 PM
Seven Studios | http://www.tivo.com.au
First Look
RRP: $699 (time of review)
Overall Rating: 
User Rating:  No user ratings.
There's no ad-skipping, but we've had a play and we're still impressed. Slick recording options make the TiVo HD outclass a great option for keeping up with favourite TV shows and movies.
Pros:
Superior Electronic Program Guide
Flexible recording times so you don't miss end of shows
Season pass for favourite shows
Smart archiving

Cons:
Ad-skipping disabled
Only 160GB HDD
PC streaming delayed until 2009

TiVo HD, which goes onsale at Harvey Norman and Domayne on July 29, lets you record two shows at once and do cool things like pause and rewind live television, thanks to the fact it automatically buffers the last 30 minutes of whatever you're watching.

Under the bonnet lie twin HD digital tuners and 160GB hard drive, which holds 20 to 30 hours of high-def content or 60 hours of standard-def. This is disappointing for the $699 price tag, but you'll be able to add external capacity next year.

Next year's firmware update will also let you stream content from a PC or the web, but you'll have to pay for the upgrade. Our review unit was easy to set up and the TiVo requires a broadband connection so it can download a full two-week Electronic Program Guide rather than relying on the hotch potch data embedded in the broadcast signal.

The TiVo checked the guide for our favourite shows and recordings can start up to 10 minutes early and run up to 3 hours over - which is more flexible than most PVRs. We easily created a Season Pass to regularly record our favourite shows, plus WishLists to search for shows according to actor, director, category, keyword or title.

To stop the small hard drive filling up, it let us nominate how many episodes to keep. Old recordings would have been automatically deleted when space is required - unless we marked them to be kept - which is another important feature lacking in most PVRs.

If we came home in the middle of recording a movie, we could watch the start while still recording the end and then fast forward through the ads until we caught up with the live broadcast.

Or course this touches on another sore point; ad-skipping has been disabled, and entering the secret ad-skip code that works on US TiVos didn't remedy the situation. We could still fast forward the adds at up to 30x, and when we pushed play it jumped back a few seconds so we didn't miss the start of the show.

The lack of ad-skipping is annoying, as is the wait for next year's extra features, but this isn't a deal-breaker when you consider TiVo's impressive scheduling and storage management features.