[Perfect Choice]

Agreed, restriction of access is not a good idea and one thing Netflix/Lovefilm provide is a different approach to subscribing to films, etc as a monthly premium versus pay as you go like now. Personally I prefer the pay a you go approach to films simply because our family hardly buy any films and never seem to have the time to watch loads anyway as we always have plenty of programmes to watch on TV or recorded on Tivo.

However one thing I thought I would highlight and based on a demo I saw of Tivo from the USA last year (it was freely available on the Internet from some show promoting the Premier box I think), is that it can search across channels and content sources.

The demo was to search for a film by title across all sources be it TV and Netflix for example, so you could pick your source to view it and not be locked down to one source.

So what VM need to get in place based on this, is the ability to search from any source including Internet based sources like Netflix and Lovefilm, on top of Filmflex of course plus TV channels, then present all the available sources and any cost associated with it, be it subscription account required or the one-time price or free of course.

This would really open up the power of Tivo effectively using its wish list software code to search all sources I guess but crucially also give you a price comparison service on top.

This would give VM and Tivo a unique advantage over the competition. IT may yet need a server based approach to do this( i.e. input search in Tivo, Tivo box submits query to VM networked server which does the actual search and then presents the answer back to Tivo to present to you) but is this the future of moving Tivo to the Cloud which could be more than just online storage for programmes as I believe I’ve read is one reason for the intended future of Tivo assuming VM keep this box long term of course.