About Our Pricing

You may from time to time go to the TiVo Inc US website and see products or services that are available there and not here - or are available at one price to US citizens but at another to Australians.

To give you an idea of what goes behind structuring the price of an item for TiVo in Australia - it may be helpful to consider the following that attribute to our pricing strategy across the board.

1. The charging model is fundamentally different between America and Australia.
   In America you cannot purchase a TiVo unit without subscribing to a monthly TiVo Service fee, in essence a subscription fee. In Australia you can purchase a TiVo and for a once-off price and get a TiVo media device which includes the TiVo Service. This Service provides you with your seven day Electronic Program Guide (EPG) as well as software updates which continually expand the services on your TiVo media device here in Australia. That said, the ongoing subscription service paid by Americans subsidises the price for other products and services and hence the price looks cheaper. We feel Australian customers would like to pay for only what they need and not for what they don't want.
    
2. TiVo in Australia is not owned by TiVo Inc in America.
   Hybrid TV is the licensee for the TiVo service in Australia and in exchange for that right - we pay TiVo a license fee on everything we sell and we often also have to pay 3rd party license fees for the Australian region. Obviously in America TiVo does not pay itself a royalty so their price is lower. These license fees add to the cost of our products here in Australia. This is a normal business arrangement between any licensee and licensor - nothing unusual.
    
3. Software and hardware in America is not directly transferable to our market.
   The TiVo unit in Australia is not the same unit in America - the differences between the two countries cost our business millions of dollars to adapt the product to the local market. In the case of the Home Network Package - it also took a considerable amount of software development to get it to work in Australia on Australian TiVo units and as such, we must recoup these costs in the purchase price to consumers as would any other business.
    

If you have a question about our pricing strategy please contact us.