Wednesday, September 07, 2005

PVR finally arrives in NZ

...not in the guise of TiVo, like in the US, but bundled into the Sky set-top box, like in the UK. PVR is a hard-disk TV recorder for time-shifting (including pausing live TV) and short-to-medium term storage. Click here for the Herald Story. All that remains is for the broadcasters to show enough reasonable content to make 60 hours worth of storage capacity worth shelling out NZ$600 for!

4 Comments:

At 2:01 pm, Blogger Unknown said...

Yes this is good! But they have gone for one without the ads skipping feature, may be to not piss off their advertisers where they get some of their profits. It would be competing with the DVD-R and the DVD-HR recorders as on the averages one these days you can get for about $1,000, with on average 120 hours of recoding time and ability to recoded off to a blank DVD witch you can keep for storage and replay on any normal DVD player or DVD-ROM. But your probable wouldn’t get the integrated feature with sky digital program guide as you would do if you got the sky personal recorders. If they come with the feature that you could recorded off to a DVD-R they would be cool.

It would be cool to have your own personal instant replay function on your TV like the do on other services like the ones in other countries.

 
At 2:21 pm, Blogger Technoculture and New Media said...

Yes, I'm guessing you will be able to pipe it out to a DVD-R (or VCR) if you wanted: I think that's how the Sky+ box works in the UK. (Though who wants to pay for a PVR and DVD-R?) This will still strike fear into the advertisers though. Here's the scenario. Instead of starting to watch Coronation St. at 7.30, you let the PVR start buffering then start watching from about 7.45 so you can still fast forward through the ads without having to wait for the programme to finish being broadcast. And big fanfare... finally, you'll be able to watch one channel on your decoder whilst recording another (in the rare event that two decent programmes are broadcast at the same time). I'm totally dependent on Sky Digital where I live as the VHF and UHF signals are abysmal. So I must write and thank the kindly old Mr Murdoch for finally granting me this 1980s functionality... if I can ever afford it. (I'm naively assuming that the pricetag will start to come down once it's established.)

 
At 3:08 pm, Blogger Andrew Cozens said...

Speaking of the herald, now it looks like you are going to have to pay to view material more than seven days old and premium content :( Damn.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm
?c_id=5&objectid=10344446

 
At 4:16 pm, Blogger Technoculture and New Media said...

Andrew - well spotted! I knew the Herald were planning this but would have missed the announcement today (buried down near the bottom of the home page!). I'm now hassling the University Library to get us an institutional subscription quick smart...

 

Post a Comment

<< Home