At long last, TiVo has come to Canada. Officially.

For the past few years, Canadians have been able to subscribe to the TiVo service, provided they could get their hands on one of TiVo’s digital video recorders and were willing to go through the steps required to activate the service. Some Canadians who already have TiVo show off their early-adopter scars with stories about customer-service agents telling them that TiVo wasn’t available in Canada, despite the fact that the callers were already customers.

Speaking with the Georgia Straight on the phone from his office in Alviso, California, Joe Miller, senior vice president of consumer sales and affiliate marketing for TiVo Inc., said that finding out what TiVo is all about will get easier for Canadians.

“To date it has certainly worked: people who were interested in having the product could in essence go to the U.S. and buy one and have a great experience,” he said. “But now we’re going to go in with the complete support of our customer-service organization.”

In case you don’t know what TiVo is, it’s a digital video recorder, abbreviated by some as DVR and dubbed PVR (for personal video recorder) by others. TiVo records television programs, stores them on a hard drive (the capacity of which is determined by which model of TiVo you have) and lets you watch them whenever you want. In this respect, it’s like the VHS machine you grew up using, without you having to mess around with tapes.

But there’s more to TiVo than hardware. When you hear people talking about TiVo, they’re talking about the TiVo service, which makes it easy to record the programs you want to watch and watch them when it’s convenient for you.

TiVo was built with the user—anyone who watches television—in mind, not advertisers or the networks. “Our employees have no other business but to make the best possible DVR on the planet, and that’s what we’re good at. We take that responsibility seriously,” Miller said.

The model available in Canada is the TiVo Series2 DT, a dual tuner that enables viewers to record two shows at the same time, while watching a third recorded earlier. The DVRs are priced at $199 and the network adapter, an essential peripheral that connects your TiVo to your wireless network, costs $79. TiVos are now available at Best Buy, the Brick, Future Shop, and London Drugs.

Colin Cottrell, merchandise manager for electronics and audio-video for London Drugs, is excited about the development. “We’ve been hoping to get TiVo for the last several years,” he told the Straight on the phone from his Vancouver office. The next development, he said, will be when TiVo brings a high-definition box to Canada sometime in the new year.

So why has it taken TiVo so long to move north of the 49th parallel? Miller said that although it seemed like it would be an easy thing to provide TiVo service to Canadians, it wasn’t so simple. “In order to do it right, it took a little bit more time and a little bit more research.”

The delay might also have been because TiVo was hoping to get into the Canadian market by partnering with service providers like Shaw, Rogers, and Bell ExpressVu. Those companies offer their own DVRs and service to customers, but TiVo has had success in the U.S. by taking over that function on behalf of Comcast and Cox Communications.

“That certainly is a part of our business strategy, but there’s no developments there today, so what we wanted to do was bring forward the best TiVo service that we can and make sure that Canadian customers had the opportunity to enjoy the same product as customers in the U.S.”

Translation? TiVo got tired of waiting for a partner, and decided to come into Canada on its own.

“Our interest in the Canadian market has been driven by Canadian consumers who have said, ‘We want a better solution. We want the best possible DVR. TiVo is it. How come we can’t get it?’?” said Miller. “We do listen, and this is in direct response to those consumers.”

TiVo DVRs provide more — and better — functions than the DVR options offered by Canadian television providers. Things like season’s passes, pausing and rewinding live television, and skipping commercials are common features, but TiVo boxes also allow the transfer of programs to computers for easy archiving on DVDs. The TiVo software also learns what programs users like, and can automatically record other television shows they might enjoy. Not to mention that TiVos can automatically record everything meeting user-defined criteria. Create a Tom Cruise wish list, for example, and you’ll never miss another public meltdown on Oprah.

Unfortunately there is no plan, according to Miller, for TiVo to offer sales incentives in Canada similar to the US$170 rebates currently available to U.S. customers.

“TiVo has suggested an MSRP [manufacturer’s suggested retail price] lower than that of units sold in the U.S.,” he said. “We believe this price is highly competitive when you factor in the functionality and service that customers will have access to.”