Australia has a lot of things going for it, but the ability to vegetate on the couch and be entertained by flawlessly auto-recorded random-access MPEG-encoded TV stored on a Personal Video Recorder is not, I'm afraid, on the list.

You can do some PVR stuff after a fashion here, and dedicated hackers have even got TiVos working fairly well. The mass market may _never_ get a decent PVR, though, and a lot of other countries are in the same boat.