Friends, our long national nightmare is over. As the CBC is reporting, TiVo is officially on its way across the border:

The TiVo set-top device, which allows viewers to record shows and skip commercials, will be available across Canada – except in Quebec – through Best Buy, Future Shop, The Brick and London Drug stores for $199. Device owners also need to subscribe to the TiVo service, which has a monthly subscription price of $12.95, with discounts available on long-term contracts.

For pioneering folks (Rob clears his throat loudly, points at himself), TiVo’s been here for well over a year – provided you don’t mind crossing the border to buy it. And much as I’d like you to think I’ve prevailed heroically against incredible odds (I am, arguably, the national poster child for Canadian TiVo adoption… and by “arguably”, I mean “if you’re really willing to stretch the definition of every word in that phrase”), our experience has been a lot smoother than the CBC suggests it has:

Some Canadians have been able to use TiVos bought in the United States but have reported problems as it has not been officially supported by the manufacturer.

Actually, we couldn’t find a way in which it wasn’t supported, apart from one initial glitch around ZIP codes, the lack of a major Canadian retailer stocking it. (Here’s one support experience we had.) Things like buying movies and TV shows from Amazon.com aren’t on the table, but that has nothing to do with TiVo and everything to do with rights licensing. And you can’t get the HD TiVo, because Canada’s cable providers are dragging their heels on supporting CableCARD.

Oh, and Merry Christmas, Michael Geist.

It’ll be interesting to see how much that changes in the next few months and weeks. For what it’s worth, here’s TiVo’s page for Canadian customers.

A service update that promised new functionality for setting up keyword searches also, unless I’m losing my mind (always a possibility to consider), added a bunch of new graphics. The navigational icons and highlight now have a little depth plus the kind of glossy finish I first encountered when Apple launched Mac OS X’s Aqua interface several years ago. (How long ago? Apple was still using Garamond.)

(It’s actually driving me a little nuts: I can’t find a reference to this change anywhere… not in the service update message, not on the TiVo web site, and not in the blogs of any of the folks who obsess about TiVo even more than I do.)

It’s worth noticing, because TiVo thinks about usability the way Yogi Bear thinks about picnic baskets. So when they make a change like this, you have to conclude they’ve had a resounding mandate from their testing labs and ethnographers. You also have to conclude that little touches like this really do matter… and that a little attention to that third dimension can yield real benefits for their users.

Maybe not all by my lonesome. But about two weeks ago, I called the TiVo support line, fed up with a months-long problem where every single TiVo show we recorded was being flagged for timed deletion: one week was the longest we could keep anything, and any show we began to watch was deleted within 24 hours.

According to a message on the TiVo machine, the restriction was because the show’s copyright holder had insisted on it. But that was supposed to be the rare exception, not the irritatingly ubiquitous rule.

I found multiple references to the issue on discussion boards and blogs, with people blaming everything from low cable signal quality to a shadowy conspiracy. Mostly, though, the consensus was that it was a bug, and what could you do?

Well, there was one thing I could do: I phoned tech support. And after only a few minutes, a very nice woman picked up, expressed surprise at my problem, asked me to hold for a few minutes, and then came back on the phone.

“We’ve had several other reports of this problem,” she said (I’m paraphrasing from memory, by the way; we don’t go for that James Frey stuff here on this blog). “Let me see… you know what? I’ve just escalated this to our senior support team. They’ll get to work on it, and you should receive a service update sometime in the next week to 10 days. After that, you shouldn’t have a problem. But in case you do, call back with this case number.”

I didn’t have to. A few days ago, our TiVo restarted thanks to a service update. And by god, the problem’s gone.

Hi-ho Silver!

After two months of waiting, wrangling and wondering, our WeaKnees hard drive upgrade for our TiVo arrived at the door this afternoon. However, we had no room for it, and told the Canada Post guy to leave it in a manger… wait a sec. Wrong story.

This is the story of the WeaKnees upgrade installation. (Good news: there’s a happy ending.)

Read on…

Waiting isn’t easy…

• TiVo does a great job of recording and playing video… but when it comes to scheduling the beast, it slows to a crawl. Maybe that’s because it has a processor speed of only 50 MHz, and 32 MB of RAM. Your average gaming console (such as Microsoft’s Xbox) clocks in at more than 10 times that speed.
• We ordered a hard drive upgrade for our TiVo from WeaKnees, a TiVo upgrade maker. Here’s something worth considering if you’re in Canada and thinking of getting TiVo: folks like these are probably new to the world of shipping outside the U.S., because Canadian TiVo support is still very new. We placed our order weeks ago, and it shipped promptly (on October 23). And then… nothing. Weaknees tells us the US Postal Service accidentally returned it to them, and that it should be in our mailbox soon. We’ll see… and we’ll keep you posted.
• I installed Google Analytics on my web site yesterday afternoon, with zero difficulty. Google told me I’d start getting stats within 12 hours. It’s coming up to 24 hours, with no sign of data yet. I’m guessing they’re getting hammered with fellow early adopters.

Updated: On Dec. 24th, two months nearly to the day after it shipped for the first time, our order arrived. The fault for the initial delay was ours — two transposed numbers in the address we originally gave them — but it would have been nice if WeaKnees had been better able to update us on the delivery status. That said, installation was very easy (if you’ve ever replaced a computer hard drive, you’ll be able to do this in your sleep) and we’re very happy.

First of all, here’s my nominee for hook-up of the year:

Yahoo and TiVo announced a deal today that will connect Yahoo’s vast online service to TiVo’s set-top boxes, which, in addition to recording television programs, have a largely unused capability to connect to the Internet.

The deal will allow TiVo, which has been struggling to differentiate its service from generic video recorders offered by cable and satellite companies, to offer a range of content and services linked to the Internet.

I’m sure it will monetize the aggregation of converging transformative paradigms, but in the meantime, here’s what I want the result to be:

MyCrawl(TM).

Yahoo has glommed onto RSS in the past year, and shows every sign of being a True Believer. So what I want from my Yahoo-enabled TiVo is a customizable crawl at the bottom of my TV screen.

Except instead of your CNN-style headlines (“BUSH APPROVAL IN SINGLE DIGITS … CHENEY CAUGHT ON CAMERA DROPPING BABY CHICKS INTO MOULINEX, BLAMES ‘LIBERAL MEDIA SMEAR CAMPAIGN’…”), it would be a fully customizable RSS feed.

I could control the number of lines displayed, and highlight any headline to call up the full article within that portion of the screen. My daughter would be able to keep watching Mighty Machines, Hi 5 and Peep and the Big Wide World, and I could keep from going slowly mad.

(I would pay extra to have James Earl Jones intone “This… is RSS” at startup.)

While I’m at it, here’s one more thing on my wish list: a “blog this” button that would create a draft post in my blog with either the link and text of the news post displayed at the time, or the name, episode and description of the TV show airing at the same time.

I came into work this morning to learn that our faces had been plastered all over last night’s broadcast of Survivor, as Global promotes tonight’s 5:30 newscast and their featured story, “Will the VCR get the heave-ho in favour of TiVo?”

Global’s reporter, the charming and talented Nathan, came by the other night to tape us with TiVo and capture our pontifications on the future of pop culture in an on-demand era. There was something disquieting about TV coming over to watch us watching TV. But we set that aside in favour of the glories of ersatz celebrity.

Your reviews will be welcome in the comments area…