Are these new or second hand?

[Joe]

Hi are the units you guys sell new or second hand (with bigger disks)?

Everything I have read from the internet says that Tivo has been replaced with sky+ in the UK so I wondered where you get them from..!

thanks,

Joe

[healeydave]

Hi Joe,
Our units vary from ex-store stock, ex-demonstrators / corporate boxes etc. Whilst no new units have been manufactured for a while, I often find when pulling a box from the pile that the system is un-used. I can tell as soon as I open it to install the new hard disk and they will often register as "1 New Call" when I run them through the soak test phase.

All systems come complete with manuals, cable set and remote control.

Tivo is still considered to be the best system for use as a PVR. Sky merely copied the concept and of-course have great marketing but because their system relies on a closed hardware design (unlike the tivo having a computer hardware design), its user interface is fairly rigid and clumsey. Sky even has the cheek to charge an independant sky+ subscription for people on their lower tier satellite subscriptions when the sky+ PVR only uses a modified version of the exisitng Sky Planner. The Tivo subscription actually provides a proper 14 day EPG guide and the user interface is one of its biggest selling strengths.

A few other things worth mentioning:

If you record a Pay Per View event on a sky+ box, it is deleted I think its 24 hours after being viewed but not on Tivo.

Not all PPV events can be recorded on Sky+, they can on Tivo.

Tivo can record other sources like Analog Terrestrial (Channels 1-5), Digital Terrestrial (Freeview), Satellite of-course and Cable TV. You can only use Sky+ to record Satellite channels.

Lifetime Subscription is available on Tivo so after 20 months the service has paid for itself and you are not tied into to continual ongoing extra payments.

If you reduce you subscriptions on Sky+, you lose all the facilities of the PVR.

If anything in the slightest glitch happens on the Sky+ system, you will be advised to do a system reset by the helpdesk whcih wipes all your recordings and settings.

I could go on.

If you have any further questions, please feel free to ask.

Regs
Dave.