Buyers guide to TiVo and Caspa

The newest box of tricks for your television, TiVo, is the biggest step yet towards media convergence.

It's packed with functionality designed to fast-forward television into the future, when it will be the home's central hub for everything from entertainment to commerce.

The drawback for early adopters is that it's expensive, with limited content.

To use TiVo as a hi-tech video recorder with on-demand options, you need $920, a Telecom broadband connection and Freeview high-definition reception.

Set-up was surprisingly straightforward, the only hitch being TiVo's tuner seems weaker than other Freeview HD tuners on the market, which may mean fiddling with an inside aerial.

TiVo's lively graphical interface is far more appealing than the dull, text-based architecture of its nearest rival, MySky HDi. It also boasts extraordinary recording flexibility and customisation, with options to tailor and categorise recordings that will astonish those old enough to remember shelling out $2500 for their first video recorder. If you're 45-plus, chances are you won't find TiVo as easy to use as the marketing suggests.

Some aspects of TiVo threaten to be more frustrating. Among its many conveniences is searching for shows to record by title and genre. The catch is the system still seems to be geared towards Americans.

To set up consecutive recordings of Coronation Street or Shortland Street, you don't look under drama but under daytime. Even though both are primetime staples here, in the United States soap operas are classified as daytime dramas.

TiVo also comes up with suggestions based on the programmes you record. Ironically, while it struggled to acknowledge my instructions to timer- record NCIS, without any prompting it automatically recorded World Kitchen a couple of hours earlier because words in the show description were similar to NCIS. (It also started recording Chinese news bulletins for no discernible reason.)

However, this inconvenience is mitigated by the automatic erasure of such unwanted programmes if the hard drive fills up. And that's less likely to happen here than across the Tasman, as the New Zealand TiVo has twice the storage: 320 gigabytes.

It also comes with another Australasian first, Caspa's On-Demand service. This allows you to set up an account to download movies, dramas, comedies, documentaries, music videos and concerts. However, choice is sparse at present.

This appraisal is based on two days' TiVo use within the first week of its launch. These are first impressions. However, with some fine- tuning, and if TiVo can sign up Prime and Maori TV for its electronic programme guide, and provide more - and better - on-demand content to compensate for having only a handful of channels you can already get on Freeview, it deserves to challenge MySky HDi for its sophistication, versatility and functionality.

WHAT'S TIVO?

A device and a service. The device is a set- top box with a hard drive that makes a virtue of, for example, recording and replaying television, recording one programme while watching another and so on.

The service is Caspa On-Demand, which delivers television, films and music over the internet. Some content is free, some must be rented. Caspa is available only to Telecom broadband subscribers, but broadband data limits are not affected.

- © Fairfax NZ News