One week after my column asking for a legal TiVo in Canada, I got half my wish as TiVo's will soon be sold by several Canadian retailers. I suspect I'll have to wait much longer for a time shifting provision in Canadian copyright law.
TiVo To Enter the Canadian Market
2 Comments
Recent Posts
Bill C-22’s Groundhog Day: Why the Government’s Dismissal of Signal, Apple and the U.S. Congress Concerns Runs Back the Disastrous Online News Act Playbook 
Slick Videos Won’t Save Lawful Access: Why The Government’s Bill C-22 Defence Avoids the Charter, Privacy and Security Concerns Raised By Critics 
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 268: Sara Grimes on the Moral Panic Behind Banning Kids from Social Media and AI Chatbots 
U.S. Congressional Leaders Warn Canadian Lawful Access Plans Harm U.S. National Security and Economic Interests 
Make It Make Sense: My Appearance Before the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security on Bill C-22’s Lawful Access Plan
You’ll have to wait even longer if you expect it to be easy to use. Digital cable and satellite providers in Canada control the decoding and decryption for their television signals. Of course it’s profitable to be the only supplier of set-top-boxes (STB) and DVRs for your service (especially when they charge you *per month* for each STB as ExpressVu does) so they have no interest in letting Tivo interoperate. That means Tivo has to do things the hard way and act like a glorified VCR, taking the output of the STB and recording that. One implication of this is that Tivo can’t record High-Definition content (when operated in this way). Additionally the Tivo may have to control channel changes ‘manually’ by pointing an internal ‘remote control’ at the STB.
In the US there is CableCard that seeks to address this issue but in Canada there is nothing that ensures interoperability and competition.
I brought my TiVo from the US a couple of years ago and signed up perfectly legally in Canada (from TiVo’s point of view anyway). I use mine on my analog cable with no issues at all – it works just as it does in the US. I’m not sure how the HD TiVos work though. Of course it doesn’t matter because you won’t be able to buy them in Canada.
By the way, you can’t really compare TiVo to a PVR. It’s far more than a simple video recorder. Once you’ve used TiVo you watch tv in a whole different way and you simply can’t live without it.