Australian retailer Harvey Norman has confirmed a July 1st launch for TiVo in Australia, according to Current. It looks like Harvey Norman will have a three month exclusive on TiVo distribution, starting July 1st. The exclusivity arrangement was first broken by The Australian Financial Review, which reported that the release would be ‘mid-July’. However, Harvey Norman executive director, David Ackery, told Current that the launch date would be July 1. The exclusivity agreement will make them the only Australian source of TiVo for the Olympics, for which Seven Network has the Australian broadcast. The price is rumored to be AUD$700, though Ackery declined to confirm the rumors, saying that details will be released with the July 1st launch. The AFR also had some details on the deal between Seven Network and TiVo:

The original agreement required Seven to pay TiVo a fee for each subscriber it signed. Under the new deal, which was finalised in April, TiVo will be paid a royalty based on how many recorders are sold here.

TiVo’s main competition in Australia will be the Foxtel iQ2 DVR, which retails for AUD$200 and carries a monthly AUD$10 subscription fee. If the AUD$700 price and no monthly fee rumors for the TiVo are true, that would mean a 50 month break-even compared to the iQ2. Which the TiVo is being pitched as a premium product it remains to be seen how it will fare in the Australian market. AFR says Foxtel has a subscriber base of 1.4 million, 350,000 of which have picked up the original iQ DVR, and 15,000 which have picked up the newer iQ2.

I guess we’ll see in a week what all of the details are with regard to pricing and features.

EDIT: The Sydney Morning Herald has also picked up the story, and they have a few more details. One thing the AFR didn’t mention, the iQ2 costs AUD$10-15 on top of the standard Foxtel subscription (Foxtel is a Pay TV service), which runs AUD$37.95 up to AUD$105.95 a month, depending on the level of service. TiVo, on the other hand, will work with the free-to-air programs so there is no additional cost. That does make quite a big different in the break-even point between the two products.

According to the Herald Sun the long-awaited Australian launch of TiVo by Seven Network will come ‘next month’. This isn’t too surprising as Seven as repeatedly said they will launch TiVo service before the Olympics, to which they hold the Australian broadcast rights, and they do need to get the boxes to customers in advance of the broadcasts. On another forum I recently said that if they didn’t launch by mid-July, then it would be time to worry.

The Herald Sun predicts that the TiVo is expected to sell for around AUD$700, which is rather more than the AUD$500 predicted by the Sydney Morning Herald last month. However, both papers predict that there will be no monthly subscription fees. The Sun reports that final pricing and plans will be announced this week,

Seven Network is planning to make an announcement Monday regarding the launch of the TiVo service in Australia, according to Smarthouse. And apparently Seven is very unhappy with parent company Unwired for leaking their plans to sell TiVo sans subscription fees and stealing thing thunder, as it were.

According to Seven Media insiders, James Warburton the network’s sales director “blew his stack” with Unwired CEO David Spence after he revealed to the Sydney Morning Herald last month intimate details in the TiVo roll out.

Unwired will handle distribution, sales, and service for TiVo in Australia, with the majority of units sold at retail. This is also interesting:

It is expected that consumers who take up the service could end up getting over 100 channels of content for free however the only hitch will be that users will be unable to remove advertising totally with new software set to deliver a commercial as they try to fast forward.

That really just sounds like the ‘billboard’ ads we have in the US, where static image ads may be displayed while fast forwarding through recorded commercials. Which really isn’t such a big deal. It isn’t known if the 30-second skip back door will work in Australia as it does in the US. I’m not sure where the 100 channels of content will come from, since there aren’t that many OTA DVB-T channels. I’m guessing they mean some kind of downloaded content.

A few weeks ago I reported the news that Seven Network would ’slash’ the planned AUD$10-12 subscription fee for TiVo service, in the face of increasing competition from Freeview and push-back from retailers.

However, due to feedback from retailers such as Harvey Norman, they’ll be dropping the monthly subscription fee. Seven had planned to charge AUD$10-$12 per month, but now will be reportedly ’slashing’ that - though the new fee hasn’t been announced.

Well, now the new price has been announced - AUD$0. That’s right, TiVo will not carry a subscription fee down under. Basically the is the equivalent to selling the TiVo with a bundled product lifetime subscription. This according to the Sydney Morning Herald:

THE Seven Media Group will launch its TiVo digital video recorder in July after a strategic overhaul that includes a surprise move to scrap a planned monthly subscription fee for the broadband-enabled service.

Before you pack up and head to Australia to take advantage of the free TiVo service, note that the box is expected to sell for around AUD$500. And that’s about USD$482.21 right now. Though that is better than the US$699 (MSRP) for a TiVo HD with product lifetime, which is the rough equivalent, it isn’t a huge savings.

Seven Network would not confirm the July launch date, but they’ve been clear that they want it available in time for users to be up and running for the Olympics - which Seven is airing in Australia. Nine and Ten networks have also signed deals with Seven Network for their channels’ guide data to be included in the TiVo EPG. And deals are being finalized with up to six retailers to carry the box.

It sounds like Australians will get a solid product:

Mr Spence said TiVo’s initial focus on an electronic program guide and the ease of recording TV programs would expand considerably by the end of the year to include online TV content and broader interactive services.

“That’s when we will start to see more things obtained off the internet,” he said.

“The main thing is to get TiVo launched for the Olympics.”

In the US, TiVo offers music and movie downloads, sharing of digital photo libraries with personal computers and access to social networking sites and online video channels.

The head of Seven’s hybrid TV services, Mark Hughes, said TiVo Australia’s line-up would match that offered in the US.

Later this year TiVo is adding YouTube to the US TiVo Series3 and TiVo HD boxes (the Australian box is based on the TiVo HD), which means enabling MPEG-4/H.264 decoding. It sounds to me like that capability will be finding its way to Australia.

It will be interesting to see how the up-front pricing works for Seven and TiVo. In the US sales have favored lower up-front pricing with monthly fees, but Australia is a different market with potentially different trends.

(Dave Zatz twittered about his post just before my Google alert twigged me to the article.)

The Australian Financial Review is reporting some new TiVo Australia news. Despite rumors that the Australian launch of TiVo was at risk, AFR is reporting that Seven Network still plans to launch TiVo service before their Olympics coverage begins in August. However, due to feedback from retailers such as Harvey Norman, they’ll be dropping the monthly subscription fee. Seven had planned to charge AUS$10-$12 per month, but now will be reportedly ’slashing’ that - though the new fee hasn’t been announced. The unit itself is still expected to sell for around AUS$500.

Due to the reduction in the monthly fee, Seven has had to renegotiate their deal with TiVo. That renegotiation contributed to the slip in the release date. Oddly the article also says “It is also understood Seven will not charge TiVo buyers for software upgrades for the first three years.”, which is strange since TiVo has never changed for software updates and it’d be odd for Seven to charge for them while charging a monthly fee. The original plan of using Internet telephony company Engin to handle distribution of the TiVo appears to have been dropped.

Picked up from Gizmodo Australia.

CNET Australia, responding to an article in MISAustralia / Financial Review, breaks down why they feel that the talk of Freeview in Australia is just a smoke-screen and not a real threat to Seven Network’s deployment of TiVo. The MIS/FI article certainly is full of weasel words like “understood to have said” and “is believed to have”, without citing any hard facts or sources to back up the speculative statements. It really comes across as written by someone with a bias towards Freeview, looking for an angle to pile some FUD on Seven’s TiVo plans.

CNET certainly seems to feel that way as well, breaking down the Australian DVR market and why they feel TiVo will still be a strong brand.

We’re not apologists for TiVo, but we don’t think it’s an amazing idea, given that the marketplace is going to be crowded with plenty of different options come the middle of the year — Foxtel iQ2, TiVo, IceTV, etc. We don’t think “branding” the already available EPG will make much of a difference to whether TiVo launches or not.

The Freeview board is only meeting for the first time this Friday, so their plans are still hazy. It sounds like they’re starting off with nothing more than a branding exercise. They’ll be putting the Freeview brand and logo on their existing EPG and digital channels, and only later will they be offering actual Freeview DVR hardware. It sounds like an effort to forestall adoption of TiVo, which Seven is planning to bring to market in June, as well as slow adoption of the Foxtel iQ2 DVR. Since the Freeview camp won’t have hardware to compete, they’re going to rely on pushing the brand without hardware to back it up and FUD about the competition.