Canada has a much bigger potential market for TiVo and much cheaper rates for Guide data from TMS - TiVo aren't interested. I suspect their only reason for entering the UK was because of Sky. Though i don't know the details of the relationship, so I can't really offer any detailed opinion.

TiVo is about to get the bitch-slap of the century in North America, so I think they need to focus all their energy on staying alive, let alone trying to expand into small markets. They'll be completely shut out of the North American satellite industry and completely shut out of the CableCo-branded boxes. I've mentioned elsewhere, their only hope seems to be Cable-Card/OpenCable (alowing compatibility with multiple cable systems by using a CAM like for satellite service). But their "service" business model is going to look even more tired in the future. New boxes with software by other vendors like NDS and Digeo are also making TiVo's limited features seem rather out-dated.

Market data says they have about 2 million of the five (to six) million DVRs in the US. At least half of those are DirecTV boxes. DirecTV is about to start offering their own NDS box and you can believe they'll stop promoting and selling TiVo-equipped hardware. The NDS boxes offer a lot of features that will capture many new subscribers - TiVo doesn't have anything to compete (and will likely be locked out anyway - their DirecTV contract ends in 2007).

They were the pioneer, but seriously, they haven't innovated or significantly improved their platform in a number of years. They also didn't make the right deals when the opportunities came up. They still have their name, which is practically a synonym for DVR, but most consumers can't tell the difference, buying any box as a "TiVo"

On the PC-software front, if you're an ubber geek and like tweaking for hundreds of man hours and are interested in spending many more in Photoshop making graphics, MythTV might be an alternative. If you're just a normal computer user, or a consumer, then it's just over-hyped and clunky software that doesn't hold a light to the features nor simplicity of TiVo. Sure it's "free" -at least there's no service fees - the hardware required is far more costlier than any TiVo.

It's all very unfortunate, but it's reality. This isn't exactly the empeg scenario if anyone was thinking of drawing a parallel. In this case there are a lot of other solutions being developed and coming to market. And many f them with far more features than TiVo and with as much, or more eye candy.

Bruno