Quote:
Originally Posted by Graham M
I beleive that's because the Sky+ boxes use TIVO's technology and Sky bought them out of the UK market?
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Not quite. Sky + would be a lot better if it uses TiVO technology.
TiVO had a lot of balls in the air in the US but they wanted to launch in the UK. So they chose a launch partner to help offset the costs. They picked Sky.
Sky paid for quite a lot of good training but marketed the system very half heartedly. Also, it was £400 for the hardware *plus* the subscription (which could be paid upfront if required). Also, the system had no internal tuner bar analogue terrestrial and so required two extra boxes if you wanted multichannel, not just one.
All this time (presumably unbeknownst to TiVO) Sky was developing their own DVR. When it came out, it was cheaper, had twin tuners and Dolby Digital on the movie channels. The picture quality was also superior as it wasn't being decoded and then re-encoded. Nobody seemed to care that to use it was a very poor second to the amazingly user friendly TiVO. TiVO simply decided to give up on the UK and concentrate on the states.
Massive shame.