BBC NEWS | Technology | PlayStation to record digital TV — And what about the USA market? Cripes!
PlayStation 3 (PS3) users in Europe will soon be able to record and playback digital TV on their console.
Sony has unveiled a TV tuner which plugs into the PS3 and turns it into a personal video recorder like Sky .
The company has held a press conference at the Leipzig games show in which it highlighted key multimedia capabilities for the PS3 and handheld PSP.
More than 200,000 gamers are expected at the German show, playing some of the year’s biggest games.
I don’t know too much about the UK’s TV taxes but I know they bill people for watching the TV’s they own and have installed in their homes. This is supposed be a usage tax of the public airwaves to benefits the BBC monopoly, apparently.
I wonder if someone over there were to record all their programs off of the internet (and not off the airwaves) if he is still liable for the tax. He wouldn’t be using the airwaves and he would have already paid for his internet connection with all appropriate taxes. I am sure their lawyers are already wrangling with this little conundrum and our politicians are watching it closely to think of a new way to tax our TV’s.
Anyway, surely Sony’s PlayTV is bound for the US eventually, right? I would hate to think that our lawyers have already crushed this idea in the States. Doesn’t the Xbox 360 already have a similar capability?
Tenets of the American ‘Free Society’? No doubt!
Cheers
#1 Please get this straight. Its not a tax. Its not a bill. Its “The Unique Way The BBC Is Funded”.
And given the choice, I would have the UK system and the BBC over the US system and no BBC any day. And yes I have sampled US TV many times.
#1 Almost all of the EU countries have this TV tax. It´s there to pay for Public TV. All countries have State owned TV, and these are public services. These have much reduced commercials (ie. we get to see films and serials without a break every 10 minutes…) and cater for minorities too…Ususally they have two channels and one is more generalist (gameshows, talk shows, serials, films…) and the other is more intellectualised (ballet, opera, documentaries, ex: “Grey’s anatomy” passes on ch1 here, but “Sopranos”, “Six feet under”, passes on ch2).
Also the state TV has worldwide Sat TV programming, and gives some space there to show private TV produced programs.
That I know of, Portugal, Spain, France, UK, Germany, (and many more…) have this system.
#1: I wonder if someone over there were to record all their programs off of the internet (and not off the airwaves) if he is still liable for the tax.
Yes – the tax is an annual TV licence, regardless of what you watch on the TV. At least when I lived in the UK, the tax covered all the TVs in a home (or office or whatever) – in other words, you paid once regardless of the number of TVs you owned. There are government detector vans that cruise the streets checking that each place with a TV has a licence. You get fined if you don’t have one.
I’m recording High Def right now thru firewire to my computer from the Comcast Motorola 6412 set top box. Cost me $8 for the firewire card and $25 for the 14 foot cable. Pretty Good job but I have not yet found an editor, to cut out the commercials, that does not throw the audio out of synch every 3 or 4th show. If this PS3 records with a pause function, I’d probably get it. I’m sure hacked versions for the GOUSA will show up immediately.
These kind of initiatives will continue to fail, so having it (or not having it) in the US is not that big of a deal.
Force the content providers to open competition on set top boxes and then you’ll have something. Until then, you’re forced to use their hardware at some spot in your home.
It would have been a much more interesting thing if Sony had forged an alliance with Tivo.
I’m surprised Sony isn’t doing it here to compete with the XBox 360’s digital content capability.
So, how do the TV “detectors” distinguish between a TV and a computer? If you watch all your video on the computer, are you still liable for the TV tax?
Also, I am curious exactly HOW they detect the TV. I can imagine that the old CRT TV’s put off a lot of electronic noise that can easily be detected by electronic sensing equipment. Can they detect a plasma, LCD, or DLP TV? And how does it know it is a TV and not a computer monitor? By the content or the “electronic signature”?
You can get BBC content off the net. It makes me wonder if they are peering in the window (hopefully not) or training audio enhancing dishes on your house. What about the privacy issues here? Sounds Orwellian to me.
Amazing…
Again, I’m flabbergasted…
Why would I want a $500+ DVR when I can get one that does 80 hours for >$250 at TARGET?!!?!