The cultural economy of TiVo in Australia

TiVo is a digital video recording device that was first introduced into the North American market in 1999. Since then, TiVo has been made available in many countries, including Australia in July 2008. This paper seeks to examine TiVo in Australia, using the cultural economy of media and communications as its theoretical framework. While related to ‘political economy’, in this paper we position the notion of ‘cultural economy’ as a preferable term on the basis that cultural economy research focuses specifically on how discourse and cultural practice constitute the spaces within which economic action is formatted and framed. This theoretical framework is employed to examine: (1) questions of ownership and control, with primary consideration given to TiVo licensing issues, and corresponding technical alterations to device capabilities that came with this; (2) representational concerns, how TiVo has been marketed, depicted, debated and discussed in the popular and trade presses; and, (3) questions of consumption, by considering, at the end of its first two years in the Australian market, how users have engaged with it thus far.