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TiVo may indeed have been a failure in the UK. Its unwillingness to break out the UK numbers from its 600,000 sales worldwide suggests the performance in Britain must have been very bad indeed. A stand-alone firm has pushed over-priced technology with no coherent marketing plan and failed to make any impact in the market.

But the inherent advantages of the PVR, or hard disk in a box, and its latent threat to the established broadcasting order, have not, and will not, go away. If the future is multi-channel, the PVR is made for it.

For some reason, BSkyB decided to confuse an already confused market by simultaneously marketing both TiVo and its own Sky Plus. It now has no excuse for not doing much better.

So far Sky Plus' performance has been respectable, with sales of 65,000 by Christmas and the likelihood it will meet its 100,000 target by the end of June.

It appears that BSkyB has gone for the slow-burn approach, hoping that positive word of mouth will do the trick among serious TV addicts. You hear the occasional whinge about mad boxes recording every football match in sight just because one was recorded once. But in general, the verdict among users seems to be positive - astonishingly so for a product that is supposed to have failed.

How then do we explain the modest beginnings? Premium prices are being charged for a secondary product that is useful, but not essential. The mixture of an upfront payment and a £10 monthly subscription is off-putting and the cost of a single payment purchase is still too high.

The problem is that it delivers no new programmes or events other than being able to see what you might otherwise have missed. It's a bit like the video recorder, which started off as a professional product and migrated slowly at first into people's homes until it became a mass-market product.

The same will undoubtedly happen with the PVR. The question is in what way and how quickly.

One way is the inclusion of the technology automatically in set-top boxes by major consumer electronics firms - something that is starting to happen.

That is a way back for TiVo, which has already signed licensing deals with manufacturers.

It might well be in BSkyB's interest to reduce Sky Plus prices - even make it a bit of a loss leader. Sky Plus ties users into the Sky electronic programme guide and makes it more likely that subscribers would take the top programming package, because they could get more from it. Sky Plus could play a much wider marketing role for the satellite broadcaster than merely being a premium-priced piece of technology.

Whatever happens, the hard disk in a box is not going to go away - with consequences for the future financing of TV.