Freeview+ continues to sell loads, as well it should, it’s a brilliant product offering. However it is still no Sky+. At the end of the day what people want from their DVR is plain and simple. Easy to use, and you don’t miss your shows.
Sky+ has a single interface, a single remote, both brilliantly designed and exceptionally easy to use.
Freeview+ could be anything. Its whatever the manufacturer could develop cheaply enough. And the remotes are indistinguishable from the multitude of hifi and shop-brand TV remotes. (Two exceptions I would point out though are the Thomson TopUp TV+ and TVonics DVR. Both have Sky+ inspired remotes which look and feel great. And Thomson has a half-decent interface, though I suspect that’s more down to TopUp TV than Thomson themselves.)
What about missing your shows?
Well Sky+ has SeriesLink and regular EPG updates over the air. It is very difficult to miss the end of a show unless the broadcaster doesn’t inform Sky of the overrun.
Freeview+? Well they’ve got their own version of SeriesLink now linked into the open Freeview EPG. But this EPG isn’t updated regularly enough, most likely because it has to be carried over the DTT broadcast.
The probability of missing the end of your show on Freeview+ is much higher than on Sky+.
So where is this going?
TIVO.
Ah, just the mention of its name brings a smile to my face.
TIVO for those who don’t know started the whole phenomenon that led to Sky+ and Freeview+. TIVO created the Personal Video Recorder. On the crest of a wave of success in the US, they arrived in the UK back in 2000, cost a fortune, were badly marketed by Comet, Currys, et all, didn’t sell well and quickly pulled out of the UK leaving a small support function behind for those enlightened individuals who bought one – which included me.
TIVO could record from analogue UHF TV and also worked with your ONdigital, cable or Sky set-top-boxes. It downloaded its EPG each night over the phone line. Ok, you could only record one channel at a time, none of this record one, watch another, it only had a single tuner.
But TIVO had TWO killer features.
One of them you’re kind of familiar with – Season Pass. Sounds a bit like Series Link? Well no prizes for guessing where Sky got Series Link from! Season Pass was the original, it allowed you to set your TIVO to record a whole series.
Now here’s where Sky+ lets you down. If you select Series Link against ER on More4 this week. Your Sky+ box will record ER each week and account for time changes, or even if a double episode is shown, or if the next episode is shown the next day.
Ok, so let’s select Season Pass against ER on More4 on TIVO, and TIVO will now record your weekly fix of ER. However TIVO knows that this is season 15 of ER and that you are interested in recording Season 15 of ER. Now why is that important. Well, remember that TIVO only has a single tuner (or set-top-box input). What if your weekly episode of ER clashes with something else on another channel that you want to watch or have a Season Pass on? Or if something overran? Because TIVO knows you want to watch every episode of Season 15 of ER, it will check it’s EPG for ALL showings of Season 15 episodes of ER. If the Thursday night episode clashes with something else, it will recheck its EPG for repeat showings of the episode. It will also check for showings of this season on other channels. So it will know that Thursday’s episode is repeated on Friday and Monday. Also that it can be seen again 1 hour later on More4+1. So there are 6 opportunities to record the show. It will then check the clashing show to see what repeat opportunities are available for that, and then make a decision on how to schedule the recording.
End result being, you never miss your show, ok you may see it a day later than its broadcast, but you NEVER miss your show.
Schedule conflict resolution. How cool would it be if Sky+ did this? Or how sad is it that Sky+ still doesn’t?
Pretty amazing feature in itself, but TIVO had another trick up its sleeve, one which was a bit controversial, but made you love TIVO more.
TIVO learned what you liked to watch. PVR truly meant Personal. TIVO logged what you were watching. It allowed you to rate the shows you watched with a unique Thumbs Up, and Thumbs Down system. When it dialled up to collect its EPG, it also uploaded your ratings and Season Pass details to its server and cross-referenced them against other TIVO owners.
It basically did the same thing that Amazon does when you’re buying a book, it would generate suggestions and stick them into a section of the menu called TIVO Suggestions. So on Amazon if you buy The Da Vinci Code, Amazon will suggest Angels and Demons by the same author, or maybe you’d like Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller (because Amazon has noticed that other people who’ve bought Da Vinci have also bought this book).
You could then go into TIVO Suggestions and alter the Thumb ratings to indicate whether you agreed with its suggestions, helping to improve its ability to guess what your taste in TV was like.
And if you allowed it to record TIVO Suggestions for you, then would magically appear in your Library a few at a time.
A wonderful feature, enabling you to discover shows you might not have been aware of and without TIVO probably never would.
I’ve long been hoping that Sky+ would develop these features fully, though obviously with enough variation to avoid infringing TIVO’s patents, but nothing so far.
So for now we’re stuck waiting and praying for TIVO to come back to the UK and put the Personal back into PVR?
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