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Judging by the gasps of surprise and envy from colleagues and strangers alike on the arrival of the TiVo box, a lot of Canadians really want one.

In fact, the TiVo people say they researched the Canadian market and found that brand recognition is riding high at 70 per cent; moreover, half of us have bought an LCD or plasma TV without subscribing to a high-definition digital service, which is precisely the market TiVo wants.

While TiVo does sell an HD box in the United States, it works only with a cable card that's inserted into a slot in the machine — a system that Canadian cable companies haven't adopted.

• If you were buying a PVR, would you consider the new TiVo box, knowing it's not HD-capable, or would you chose a PVR from your cable or satellite provider? Answer the poll question at Globetechnology.com

TiVo's strategy, then, is to persuade prospective customers that getting a TiVo is better than getting an HD or a standard-definition set-top box from your cable or satellite provider. That pitch works, as long as buyers are happy with standard definition TV. But if you have a big screen or plan to get one, the benefits of the TiVo box fade quickly.

Despite those limitations, the Series 2 TCD649080 dual-tuner digital video recorder still has several advantages over the competing set-top boxes, especially the Emmy Award-winning interface.

Finding a program in a 500-channel world is a pain with Bell ExpressVu or Rogers services. (Rogers forces viewers to hunt for shows using only the first letter. Searching for Law & Order, for instance, starts with an enormous number of French programs beginning with "Le," "La" or "Les") TiVo accepts more letters than one, and also has a sophisticated breakdown of shows by type. You can search by actor, director or category; TiVo will also, in broad terms, use these criteria to recommend other shows. You can, for instance, program it to search for cooking shows with recipes involving chicken and soup, and TiVo will record them all. And once the shows are recorded, they can be organized into a variety of categories, unlike the Rogers system, which sorts recorded shows only by date.

The TiVo box relies almost entirely on your service provider for the channel lineup, though it does add some local services, such as weather, traffic reports and purchasing movie tickets (using a service called Fandango). TiVo adds the organization, which makes the competition look like slackers. Moreover, TiVo handles two weeks of listings at once, making it easier to record future shows.

The box available in Canada has two TV tuners in it, like the more sophisticated set-top boxes, which means viewers can record two separate shows simultaneously and watch a third prerecorded show at the same time. Its 80-gigabyte hard drive can hold about 80 hours of standard definition TV.

TiVo's system relies on the Internet or telephone to get its listings. It can be set to dial a toll-free number regularly to download the latest lineups. Or, if a broadband connection is available, it can do the same over a wired Ethernet or wireless connection (TiVo sells an extra USB wireless dongle for $59.95 to connect to the WiFi network). To complement that, TiVo also has software (Mac and Windows) to play recorded shows on the computer or, better, burn them onto a CD or DVD disk.

But most services won't allow subscribers to burn HD shows to disk anyway; Rogers, for instance, allows saving an analog version to VCRs, but these are rapidly disappearing from retailers' shelves. It's impossible to get around that limitation using off-the-shelf components.

Another feature you can't get from mainstream TV providers is called TiVoToGo, which sends photos, MP3 music files or even movies suitably formatted to portable devices, such as iPods, PlayStation Portables or smartphones.

A TiVo box, then, is ahead of what is currently available in its easy management of the recordings, its ability to connect via the Internet for downloads and to a home network for playing and burning shows.

But it is behind the competition because it is a standard-definition device.

And because TiVo is as much a subscription service as it is a DVR, customers must sign up for a cellphone-like monthly plan: $12.95 per, or a three-year contract for $8.31 a month. The box alone sells for $199. To make a final decision on whether to buy a TiVo, consumer will have to match these numbers with what your local providers are asking for.

It will, however, be interesting to see how the big local players — Bell, Shaw, Rogers, Videotron and the others — respond to the arrival of TiVo. The first thing they should do is improve their own interfaces.