I'm thinking of going for Sky+. Is it any good, I assume it's not a flexible as a Tivo, but what's it like?

Firstly I should say I have never used Tivo, but I do understand how it works and what it does.

I am very happy with the Sky+ box. My main problem with multi channel TV is not finding something to watch, it's finding that the things I want to watch are always on too late or at the same time as something else I want to watch.

The good points about it are:

- quality of the recordings is exaclty the same as live TV (because the digital stream gets saved)
- it is very easy to use (because it is indentical to a normal digi box with half a dozen extra buttons, which is good because my wife is resistant to learning new stuff and she knows how to use a digibox)
- it is very stable I have had no hangs or crashes yet (I get less than friends with normal digiboxes)
- it doesn't require any of the Tivo oddities of having the Tivo controlling the digibox via the remote (I understand that is not always 100% successful)

Another good thing about the Sky+ box is that it is far faster than all the other Sky digiboxes. On a normal digibox paging up and down in the EPG takes nearly two seconds, on the Sky+ box it is instant. Other parts of the interface are also faster, I think it must have a much faster main processor. This makes a big difference to usability.

The Sky+ box isn't perfect by any means:

- it's equivalent of Season Passes (called Series Links) don't work as well as the Tivo ones and they rely on the channel owners sending the right data
- the EPG data only looks forwards 7 days
- you can't record two things at once (there are only two tuners, one of which is needed to receive EPG data and live TV)
- the live pause feature doesn't have a constantly filled buffer (i.e. it only starts buffering when you press pause, you can't turn on the TV, find you are half way through a program on the current channel and back up to the start)
- the live pause feature only fills the buffer to the end of the current program

The last two live pause issues are due to be fixed in a software update to make them behave more like the Tivo buffer. Overall there is the problem that Sky are trying to make it easy for everyone to use, rather than giving power users the features they want (though they have made changes after being prompted in the past).

If there had been a Tivo box available with two Sky digital tuners in it then I probably would have bought the Tivo instead as I appreciate the extra Tivo features are worthwhile. But there isn't, in the UK, so for me the Sky+ box is better.