In a press release from Hybrid TV, they have announced a new 1TB model of the TiVo. Don’t be fooled people, the TiVo XL is nothing more than an upgrade from the 320GB to a 1TB hard drive. Once again the TiVo returns to Harvey Norman (and Joyce Mayne) as an exclusive for A$699.

What’s disappointing is that Hybrid TV not offering a completely new model. Thanks to the wonderful world of the internet, TiVo fans know that we’re getting left behind in Australia. TiVo in the US, has released two new models since Australia got it’s first.

The latest of which is TiVo Premiere Elite, containing 4 tuners, 2TB HDD, new hardware and software design and support for mobile apps. The updated UI is build on flash and features improved speed, search functionality and access to a bunch of online services like YouTube, Picasa, Photobucket and Podcasts. Essentially this is the TiVo we should be getting in Australia, but sadly aren’t.

Lift your game Hybrid TV, it’s insulting that you don’t understand that we know what’s happening in the rest of the world. Clearly it’s easier to sit back, wait for hard drive prices to drop, slowly increment the storage in a device that was released in the US on September 12, 2006.

Please spend the time to licence the TiVo Premiere Elite for Australia, do the local customisations and do the right thing by your fans and your customer-base in Australia will flourish.

More info @ Harvey Norman

Director of TiVo Australia or Hybrid Television Services (ANZ), Robbee Minicola has left Australia, and is already back in her home country of the USA, after working internationally for 27 years. She confirmed this with a post on twitter a few hours ago. Her profile description listed her as  the “TiVo mad leader working towards building the best TiVo experience in AU and NZ”.

TiVo in Australia hasn’t exactly been booming with poor sales numbers, lack of updates and models and downsizing to skeleton staff. With the head of the company, TiVo’s future in Australia becomes even more bleak. As an owner and fan of TiVo, its incredibly frustrating that TiVo is being left to die like this. There has now been multiple models and updates released internationally that have not made it to Australia.

What has always puzzled me about TiVo is its lack of partnerships and bundles with television manufacturers. Consumers have embraced HDTV’s over the past few years in a massive way, so bundling a discounted TiVo would have been a great way to drive sales. One hope for TiVo fans is that Australian licencee of TiVo, would be acquired by someone who has the resources and passion to make TiVo a success in Australia. Fingers crossed.

In a service message to TiVo owners in Australia, its been revealed there’s some major outages on the way. Normally service outages are scheduled for the early hours to minimise impact on consumers. Strangely these TiVo outages are during the day and will occur over almost a week and last between 7 and 12 hours.

It’s being labelled as scheduled maintenance, but this will be the most significant outage since TiVo launched in Australia. While the device / service could do with some much needed upgrades, past experience tells us that’s unlikely to be the case.

Scheduled Maintenance

Please note we will be carrying out routine maintenance on the TiVo Service and CASPA Service on the following days:

Wednesday, August 3 – 10am to 5pm (AEST)

Thursday, August 4 – 10am to 5pm (AEST)

Friday, August 5 – 10am to 5pm (AEST)

Monday, August 8 – 8am to 8pm (AEST)

The following services will be unavailable during those times:

• CASPA On-Demand
• My Account
• TiVo Genie
• TiVo Activations
• Games & Showcases

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

In an email to TiVo subscribers, news arrives that Sony Music content will no longer be available on TiVo. Starting from the 27th June 2011 the content loss also extends to Bandit.fm content. While the reason why the Sony Music content is being pulled still remains a mystery, what is clear is that TiVo is going backwards in Australia.

No new models, features or updates are being released and now content is beginning to disappear. While the US version of TiVo are enjoying Series 4 devices with a much improved flash-driven HD UI, and iPhone/iPad apps, Australians are left out in the cold with Series 3.

While its doubtful that many consumers bought the TiVo for its IP-delivered media (still SD), any loss of content or functionality sends the platform in the wrong direction. On the 27th of June, the content will disappear automatically.

Read the full message @ TiVo

Since the start of February 2011, I’ve been unable to get the GO! channel and guide data for GEM had stopped updating. As TiVo is my set-top-box / PVR, I turned to TiVo support for assistance on the issue and emailed them on February 18th. Strangely not everyone in the area experienced the issue. Fast forward 2 weeks and finally a response from TiVo arrives in the inbox.

Hi Jason,

Apologies for the long delay, we have been investigating this issue since 4 February. Channel 9 has doubled up on triplets in your region and this has caused this cross-wiring and loss of EPG data. Channel 9 acknowledged the issue on 16 Feb and have promised to implement a fix tomorrow morning. The data should be available on the TiVo as of this Friday.
I am very sorry for the long delay in the fix, it was a struggle to get Channel 9 to even believe there was an issue in the first place. Thank you for your patience.

For any future enquiries related to this issue please reply to this message leaving the reference number in the subject.
Regards,

Hybrid TV Level 3 Support

WIN are trying to market this as an ‘upgrade’ but in reality the required re-scanning is just a fix for this issue. Affected channels include WIN, GO! and GEM.

You can check out WIN’s Rescanning guide PDF for details of how to perform the ‘upgrade’ for your TV/STB.

More @ TV Tonight

It’s finally here ! An update to TiVo’s electronic program guide (EPG) arrives today ! This means that changes will be reflected ‘up-to-the-minute’ rather than half hour increments previously. If your TiVo has ever recorded the wrong program, this was likely the reason why. Stations frequently re-schedule or cancel programs at the last minute and with TiVo basing its recordings on guide data this creates a frustrating issue for users.

The following networks: Seven, Nine, Ten & ABC will now all display scheduled program start and finish times that are “up-to-the-minute”.

Read the full info on TiVo’s EPG update.

Tomorrow, July 13th is a big day for TiVo Australia owners with 12 brand new on-demand TV channels. The new channels will be ad-supported or “sponsored” with the first channel announced – Bella TV being sponsored by Cadbury. Bella TV will be a dedicated channel targeted towards women, so the Cadbury sponsorship makes a lot of sense with plenty of chocoholics out there.

As for the content of the other 11 channels, we’ll have to wait and see tomorrow as TiVo has been quiet on what they’ll include. 

The new channels will be part of the CASPA section of TiVo and require users to have a CASPA wallet. This effectively means to access the new IPTV channels, you’ll need to hand over your credit card, despite the channels being free. For those TiVo owners who haven’t yet got a wallet, it’s also required to download the Movies, TV Shows or Music content from CASPA.

More info @ TiVo Australia

TiVo is the latest in a long line of manufacturers to catch the 3D bug, announcing today they will support 3D channels. If you live in a major city, you may be getting a 3D channel right night, try rescanning your channels. The TiVo is capable of interpreting this channel and doing the pass-through to your 3D enabled TV.

Hybrid TV, creators of TiVo in Australia say that if you don’t have a 3DTV yet, you can record the shows to your TV now and watch them back when you do. A nice idea, but given most people won’t replace their HDTV for a few years, you’ll need a lot of storage to hold all your 3D.

If you are one of the ‘lucky’ ones with a 3D TV and live in a major city that’s getting 3D, then you can watch the State of Origin tonight in 3D. With TiVo you can record it and show it off to your friends later, after all there’s not a lot of other 3D content around to demo your 3DTV.

For those without a 3DTV the channel is still viewable and looks like this. The 3DTV would take the left side of the image, un-squash it to the full 1920×1080 image, then follow that frame with the right side of the image. Showing one frame after the other and pairing that with appropriate glasses will give the appearance of 3D. This technique should mean that recording 3D shows on your TiVo requires the same storage as a normal show, the smarts is done by the TV, rather than more data being sent in the broadcast over-the-air stream.

Update
I’ve had confirmation from Hybrid TV PR, makers of TiVo in Australia, that TiVo users will still be able to browse CASPA content without a wallet (registering), but won’t be able to download. This is the current situation, which begs the question, why the email if nothing has changed?

TiVo owners will be familiar with the CASPA menu item that provides access to video on-demand content. This is currently open to browse, but requires signup before downloading even free content, this is about to change.

In an email message to TiVo owners users yesterday, TiVo is now requiring users to create a CASPA wallet (i.e. hand over your credit card) to even browse the store. If users can’t preview the content before signing up, I’m not sure how they are expected to know why they’d want CASPA in the first place.

Thanks TiVo, but I’ll pass. Now I have a dead menu item, not the best user experience. Just let me hide CASPA and I’ll be happy.

More @ TiVo

Earlier today HP released an awesome new add-in for their MediaSmart Home Servers. The MediaSmart Expander for TiVo allows you to copy your favourite recordings to the MediaSmart so running out of storage should never be an issue again. Another feature is the ability to stream those shows from your PC back through your TiVo to your TV.

This means you’ll never need to fork out for that Western Digital 1TB Expander drive, your own storage that you’ve already invested in. The only downside is the transfer is a manual one. So you’ll need to open the Home Server Console Periodically and transfer the show you wish to keep, then delete them from the TiVo. While that may seem annoying, the upside is the storage amount is only limited to the size of your Home Server array, which as you know is easily upgradable.

This Add-in is supported on HP MediaSmart EX490/EX495 and HP DataVault X510 models, earlier models are not compatible. On the TiVo side you’ll need a Series II, Series III, TiVo Premier. Both Australian TiVo models will work. One more caveat is that both the TiVo and MediaSmart must be on the same network. In the standard home setup, this isn’t an issue.

If you in the US, you’ll see a new Add-in available in the Settings screen of the Home Server Console. If your outside of the US, then head over to http://www.hp.com/united-states/consumer/everyday-computing/mediasmartserver/us/en/tivo.html and download the Add-in manually.

Step 1 – Setup
Copy the HPTivoExpanderAddin.msi file into the Software/Add-ins folder on your Home Server. 

Step 2 – Install the add-in
Open the Windows Home Server Console, click Settings in the top-right corner.

Step 3 – Activate
Select the MediaSmart Add-in and click install. Once finished installing the Home Server Console will need to restart.

The next time you launch it, you’ll notice the addition of the HP MediaSmart Expander for TiVO© item to the left-hand side menu.

Step 4 – Configure
There’s very minor configuration required before the devices can talk to one another. Simply click on the Configuration button at the top-right and enter your TiVo Media Access Key, available from your account page on http://tivo.com.au

Step 5 – Select
Once configured you’ll see the files stored on your TiVo. To transfer files to your MediaSmart, select each file (holding CTRL+click for multiple), when your ready to go, click the Transfer Selected Files button.

Once the Transfer is in progress, go make yourself a coffee, or 10.. this process is not fast. When complete the files (shows) will display in the third tab Files on Server where they can be deleted if you wish, or simply browse to the folder and delete them like normal files.

Step 6 – Location and Playback
After some investigation I discovered the files are actually transferred to \\MEDIASMART\Recorded TV\tivo. If you’d like to playback the files, you’ll need the TiVo Desktop software installed on your machine.

Step 7 – Watch on TV
Another option, and probably the more common, is for playback through the TiVo to your TV. To play the files (now located on your MediaSmart, scroll right to the bottom of your Now Playing list and you’ll find a new item called HP MediaSmart Server (MEDIASMART) where MEDIASMART is the name of your server.

That’s it, that’s all there is.. well except for an nice little easter egg.. those guys at HP seem to love them. Discovered by the guys over at mediasmartserver.net, if you double-right click on the TiVo DVRs Found section, you get a 4th tab Team Info.

In other news.. while hunting around HP site today I noticed, the HP EX490 MediaSmart Servers have dropped in price. I paid A$899 for mine only a few months back, they are now A$749.

More info @ HP.com