Reluctant couch potato JOHN HARRIS discovers a reason to tune back into TV in the form of TiVo, a smart viewing assistant for the gogglebox

When my family bought our first TV set in 1965, cousins came from far and wide to watch the one-channel wonder in beaming black and white.

Eight years later, a second wave of relatives invaded our house when colour burst on the scene along with a second television channel.

How times have changed!  Over the past few weeks, the Internet has merged with my TV - and not one family member has dropped by to goggle at this milestone.

While this may reflect my welcoming personality or the fact that I grew up in New Zealand, I prefer to view it as a symptom of how much we take innovation for granted.

 For the first 50 years of its existence, television was a one-way medium, from the TV station to your set. This one-way flow was only slightly staunched by devices such as the remote control, the VCR and, more recently, the hard drive recorder.

In recent weeks, I’ve used a couple of devices that turn TV into more of an on-demand experience.

One is a Playstation3 console that Sony gave away with a TV I bought earlier this year and the other is TiVo, a personal video recorder, loaned for review by its Australian distributor, Channel Seven associate Hybrid Television Services. Both devices cost about $700.

For Internet access, I used a pair of Billion home plugs (which transfer computer data across my house’s electrical wiring) to link the PS3 and TiVo to my broadband router a couple of rooms away.

The Playstation3 is basically a game-playing computer with a Web browser which lets me access websites, including YouTube, from the comfort of a sofa rather than sitting at a desk. As more video content becomes available online, this is an increasingly attractive option.

That said, I still regard it as a novelty.

By comparison, TiVo changed my TV viewing behaviour in the three weeks I used it.

On the whole, I’m not a big TV fan: Shows I enjoy are so few that I rarely bother to read the TV guide to hunt out, highlight and ultimately record possible programs.

Rather than entering G-codes or recording times, TiVo let me select programs from an on-screen program guide that is kept up to date via the Internet.

While TiVo records free-to-air TV programs to a hard disk drive like standard hard disk recorders, it is distinguished by its smarts.

I could browse upcoming programs by channel, by subject and by day. It took only a couple of clicks to record either a single show or a whole series. After using TiVo for a few days, it suggested shows I might like based on my previous choices (not hard due to my narrow interests)

TiVo’s 160-gigabyte hard drive holds 60 hours of standard definition recordings and about half that time of hi-def shows. A nice feature allowed me to set how many shows to keep, reducing the risk of arteriosclerosis of the hard disk.

Dual TV tuners mean two shows can be recorded at once. It’s easy to set TiVo to start and finish recording a couple of minutes early to provide “wiggle room” for a show’s screening time.

A nice feature is that TiVo records the currently viewed TV channel on its hard drive, making it possible to pause, rewind, replay and even fast-forward (up to the present) shows as they are playing.

What I liked about TiVo was not a single feature, but the entire package. The electronic program guide made it easy browse, find and record programs while Internet updates navigated recordings around scheduled broadcast changes. TiVo even forecasts the weather!

TiVo even includes a KidZone that allows only G or PG rated shows and other pre-approved content: While I didn’t test this, it could be good unless my daughter figures out how to program it to stop me watching football.

John Harris is managing director of Impress Media Australia. You can view his website at www.johnharris.net.au .

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