During the maintenance work on the TiVo and CASPA services, various features may be unavailable, including the CASPA On-Demand service, My Account functionality, TiVo Genie, and Games and Showcases. Additionally, activation of new TiVo accounts will be unavailable during this period, so it isn’t a good time to buy a new TiVo. But this should be a short period of inconvenience in exchange for a more robust system going forward.

Still, putting my datacom professional hat on, I wonder how the back end is architected. Normally you design things such that the ability to failover and upgrade doesn’t cause an outage. The short version is that you setup the new infrastructure in parallel, then cut over in one go. Or you cut the traffic to half the systems, upgrade, then cut over to the upgraded servers, upgrade the rest, then bring them all back. That’s oversimplifying, but I’ve done this for years and it is pretty common. Services you use daily do this all the time and you never know it. Hopefully that’s a lesson learned and this upgrade will also set the foundation for future upgrades without prolonged outages.

Via iTWire.

While iTWire says of TiVoI think it’s the best choice for Australians who want a PVR that “just works”, they still have some issues with it. And the article counts down their top ten. I’ll take a shot at them.

10. No thumbnails on recordings list

Adam, the article’s author, had been using Windows Media Center so this is something he was used to there. Personally I don’t think it is that useful, the title of a show is more meaningful to me than a random thumbnail image from a recording.

9. Can’t use the onscreen display to flick through EPG

From the description he gives it sounds like PIP, watching one program with a PIP image of what’s on other channels while surfing the guide. I suppose if there is a free tuner and PIP it could be a nice thing to have. But it’d only work if a tuner was free, so it could be confusing for users if it works some of the time but not all of the time.

8. No picture in picture

See #9, I think you’d need this to do it. Since the newer TiVo units have two tuners it seems like it might be possible for TiVo to add PIP. It has certainly been something US users have requested too.

7. No warning against changing the channel when time shifting

While I don’t use Live TV, I fully understand the desire to have this. As long as TiVo flushes the existing buffer when switching channels it would be nice to have some warning if you’re behind in the buffer. One accidental channel change can ruin your day. People have been asking for this since the earliest days of TiVo.

6. Can’t limit a Season Pass to episodes screening at a particular time of day

This is something else US users have repeatedly requested. The most common examples are The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, which often have bad guide data and cause TiVo to record all five airings of the same episode. Users have wished for a way to tell TiVo to limit the Season Pass to, say, between 23:00 and 00:00. Sure, you can use manually recordings to work around this, but then you give up many of the advantages of a Season Pass – such as automatically handling conflicts, and doing the right thing when the guide data is correct.

5. Can’t check remaining hard drive space

The Free Space Indicator (FSI) is perhaps the most oft requested TiVo feature in the history of TiVo. Sure, I understand that TiVo’s philosophy of use is supposed to make the FSI unnecessary. But users increasingly expect it as nearly every other DVR on the market has one. And it is a natural thing to look for since legacy recording technologies such as VHS and DVD-R require the user to be aware of the remaining time. And no, there is no technical reason TiVo couldn’t do it. While bit rates can certainly vary, TiVo knows the maximum bitrates. The maximum bitrate is the ‘worst case scenario’, so TiVo can certainly say “There is at least X time remaining”. While I initially didn’t feel the FSI was a big deal, over time I’ve changed my opinion and now I really think TiVo should implement an FSI.

4. No 24 hour skip forward or back in the onscreen EPG

Well, this we know is part of the 9.4 update now rolling out in the US. So hopefully Australia will see this in a future update as well. (Incidentally I still have not received 9.4 on my Series3.)

3. EPG doesn’t indicate which programs are scheduled to be recorded

This is another feature long requested in the US. I don’t understand why TiVo doesn’t do this, it seems like an obvious UI feature. You’d expect to see some indication in the EPG of upcoming recordings, so it is hard to understand why user-friendly TiVo has never implemented this.

2. No ad skipping

He’s basically referring to 30 second skip, which we have in the US as a back door code. It seems the code has been removed from the Australian software, seemingly by Seven Network’s. Since TiVo has included this in all of their US software (even the Comcast software) it seems unlikely that they’d elect to remove it in Australia without Seven requesting it.

1. No streaming content from a computer

The Australian TiVo lacks the networking features found in the US units, such as TiVoToGo (transfers from TiVo), and the associated TiVoToComeBack (transfers to TiVo). The Australian units are expected to receive these features in a firmware update early next year, so this should be resolved then. Though TiVo’s media support is still lacking compared to other media extenders. Hopefully TiVo will expand the native media support to MPEG-4/H.264 and WMV/VC-1 in an update so that everything needn’t be transcoded to MPEG-2. (While 9.4 adds H.264 support for YouTube playback it remains to be seen if they’ll extend it to generic playback support.)

Members of the digerati seem to be so immersed in the digital lifestyle that they often forget they’re not the average user. Just because something doesn’t meet the needs of the digital elite doesn’t automatically make it crap.

That’s been happening with some of the coverage for the launch of TiVo in Australia. Since some of the networking features won’t be rolled out until a future software update a few of the tech blogs have been fairly negative about the Australian TiVo. But they’re ignoring the features the TiVo will have as a DVR, well above and beyond other DVRs in the market. And even without all of the additional features, it will have some of them which is another advantage. As iTWire nicely put it:

I agree that waiting for extra features is frustrating but, purely as a Personal Video Recorder (which is its primary purpose), Australia’s TiVo will be very impressive straight out of the box. Much of the criticism seemed to come from fanboys of other high-end PVRs, plus Seven and Nine-haters who were venting their spleens.

Yes the lack of ad-skipping is annoying and just reinforces the fact that Australians get screwed by the local networks. Yes the networks are bastards for withholding EPG data and dragging IceTV through the courts. That doesn’t change the fact that the Australian TiVo is a great solution for the average man on the street, if not power users. Some media centre owners believe the world is conspiring against them, but they have to accept the fact that media centres aren’t for everyone and the average person doesn’t want a computer in their lounge room.

The same article also talks about similar negative blog coverage regarding the Australian launch of the iPhone. Local cell carrier Optus is offering 100MB to 1GB of data per month on its Australian iPhone plans, which a lot of geeks feel is too little. But for many users that’s plenty for checking email via IMAP, a little web browsing, etc. You’re really a heavy user to need more than 1GB/month – lots of video streaming, etc.

Australian IT reports that Seven Network has imported“at least 20,000″ units for the launch later this month. There is one thing that isn’t clear from the coverage – if broadband is required or not. Some of the coverage implies broadband is required, period. But others make more since to me, such as Australian IT“consumers who buy TiVos must connect it to their broadband internet connection to be able to access the full array of services.” That sounds very much like the US where you can use the TiVo with a modem, but you miss out on all of the network-related features. An Amazon Unbox-like movie download service is also coming for Australia:

At this week’s TiVo launch, [TiVo Australia general manager Mark] Hughes said Seven would soon announce a similar arrangement to the Amazon movie service offered by TiVo in the US. “Before that we’ll be pushing some short-form video of maybe five to 10 minutes to the boxes.

‘But within six months, possibly a little longer, I would expect to be providing a movie download service as well.”

We also learned, through The Sydney Morning Herald, that Harvey Norman’s exclusivity period, earlier widely reported as three months (and as one month by a few sources) is actually six weeks. This was confirmed by Harvey Norman executive director, David Ackery. Harvey Norman is predicting that TiVo will expand the Australian DVR market by 50% within a year.

And they may be on to something. When the competition says TiVo has a good chance at selling at least 50,000 units in the next twelve months, that’s good news. Especially when the break-even point for Seven Network is below 50,000 units sold.

The Digital Products Group, which sells a number of different DVR models under the Beyonwiz brand, has seen its business with Harvey Norman crash in recent weeks because of its exclusive deal with TiVo, but its general manager, Jai Kemp, says he will still sell about 25,000 $800-plus DVRs in the next 12 months. He says a target of 50,000 for TiVo in a year is achievable, although 100,000 is not. Seven’s break-even point on TiVo is below 50,000 units.

“Fifty thousand is quite possible,” says Kemp. “They’ve got a lot of marketing dollars behind them and they can run TV commercials all night.”

And then there is an article from The Courier-Mail, which bucks the trend by being fairly negative on TiVo’s prospects. It is also interesting that the article also cites reports that JB Hi-Fi will not be stocking TiVo, even after Harvey Norman’s exclusivity period ends. That’s interesting because those reports were countermanded by additional comments from JB Hi-Fi before this article came out. And the article compares TiVo’s pricing to Foxtel’s iQ2, but leaves out the cost of the Foxtel subscription. But on closer inspection that isn’t too strange, since they’re owned by News Corp. News Corp. also happens to be part owner of Foxtel, the Australian pay TV service who’s iQ2 DVR will be TiVo’s primary competition. iTWire has done a great job of covering, and rebutting, the points raised in The Courier-Mail article, as well as adding some additional coverage.

The Australian TiVo offers the four vital features that almost every other PVR on the Australian market lack – a proper Electronic Program Guide, a “Season Pass” feature, intelligent storage management and a generous margin for error when it comes to scheduling recordings.

He seems to have laid to rest the unsubstantiated rumor that the Australian TiVo would somehow block ad skipping by saying it has fast-forward, but not a 30-second skip. However, he doesn’t clarify if he tried the SPS30S 30-second skip backdoor that US TiVo units have, or was just referring to the fact it isn’t a standard feature. I suspect the latter. He also answers a question I had about the eSATA port by saying it is not currently active and will be activated in a future firmware update.

Australian TV networks are worse than US networks when it comes to sticking with a published schedule. They regularly start early and run late, which will make TiVo’s padding abilities useful. But it sounds like TiVo has a special trick up its sleeve for Australia. According to iTWire it will automatically pad recordings by 10 minutes during prime time – ending recording 10 minutes after the scheduled program end (the time is adjustable). And recordings of live programs are automatically extended by an hour, which sounds like a nice improvement on the reminder message US units received in a recent update. This sounds just like the ‘soft padding’ that has been oft requested in the US, and I hope we see this development re-imported back to the states. I do kind of presume it only auto-pads recordings when the tuner is free and nothing else is scheduled to record, of course.

All in all it was a very positive review, good news for TiVo’s prospects down under.