TiVo to Offer More of Everything — Except HD

TiVo owners can look forward to a far bigger library of on-demand downloads over the media device’s CASPA service but don’t expect to watch any of it in HD for the foreseeable future.

“At some point, CASPA will provide HD downloads,” Hybrid Television Services corporate affairs chief Rebecca Blasina told ScreenScribe.tv.

“However, it won’t be until such a time as broadband suppliers provide a proportion of consumers high speed and high capacity plans of at least 10Mb/s [megabytes per second].”

So, in the meantime, the only HD content you can view on TiVo are the limited hours TV One, TV2 and TV3 broadcast.

But Blasina says entering the NZ market with the country’s largest telecommunication provider, Telecom, has driven a “significantly greater” uptake of the CASPA service in NZ compared to Australia.

“This proves that the correlation between TiVo being sold through a telecoms provider positions the broadband proposition of CASPA top-of-mind to customers who are able to download content without it impacting their monthly data allowance.”

CASPA On-Demand entertainment offers more than 360 movies, 160 TV series and more than 60 free music videos.

“To date, more than 18,000 movies, TV episodes, music videos and concerts have been downloaded by New Zealanders,” Blasina says.

“As the customer base grows, Hybrid TV can see a clear distinction between broadband download behaviour between New Zealand and Australia, with New Zealanders being far more liberated in their broadband download approach than customers across the Tasman.

“Over the next three months, CASPA On-Demand is set to increase its suite of entertainment dramatically with the addition of a further 260 movies and over 1000 hours of TV.”

By Easter, 40 more TV series and 100 more movies will have been added. Moreover, since TiVo’s launch in November, the quality has improved with the quantity.

For instance, you can now download episodes of series that have yet to screen here, such as series three of The Street (which TV One will air later in the year) and the final season of The Shield (which none of the broadcasters has picked up and is still languishing for a DVD release nearly a year after it went on sale in North America and the United Kingdom).

However, Blasina wouldn’t comment on a recent spate of articles in NBR, The Dominion Post and the Herald on Sunday questioning the success of TiVo’s NZ launch and estimating sales have been much lower than Hybrid would have hoped.

“We do not release our sales figures in New Zealand or Australia,” she says. “This is not something new – we have never released sales figures and never will.”

Burt she did confirm there are no immediate plans to add the extra features of the new US model, the Premiere Series 4, to the NZ TiVo.