I recently purchased a Tivo, as Telecom offered their home line customers a very special deal ! Psst …. see below for the special deal I got !
What is Tivo ???
Tivo is a very clever Freeview box with an internal hard drive which connects to your UHF aerial and Broadband internet feed. This gives you the freeview terrestial stations plus access to a large variety of free and pay for, programs via their Caspa service. The machine can record two programs at once while you view another.
When the machine is not busy recording programs you have requested, it will record the last half hour of the last channel you watched, so if you missed the start of a program on that channel say the news, you can still go back in time.
As well Tivo will record programs from various channels that it thinks you may like !
It eventually learns all your tastes because you tell it via a thumbs up/down button what you think of a program.
My one has learned not to record cooking programs so far !
Of course I could use the freeview facility of what is known as a “Seasons pass” and tell it to record say every TV3 late news or episodes of whatever.
The download Caspa service is amazing – you set up a wallet and order a program and after a few minutes it starts downloading and you can begin to watch it while the download continues. (thats providing your broadband speed is reasonable)
Any downloads by Telecom customers are treated as unmetered broadband usage.
Also if you have a Home Network system you can call up programs from the Tivo to your computer or a home network capable Television set in another room !
The special Telecom deal I got was $350 at $10 a month for 3 years, which is added to your monthly phone bill. You then own the machine. Normally $499 !
Stop Press: The American Tivo system is licenced to Australia's Network 7 (67%) & NZ TVNZ (33%) - Australia Network 7 is bailing out and it is rumoured another high flying company will take over the licence.
