Sony PlayTV delayed?

By Tom Bramwell Published 1 May, 2008

Another PAL region quoting Q4.

Sony in Australia has told Gizmodo that PlayTV - the PS3's USB TV tuner and video-recording add-on - will launch there in Q4 2008.

The device's launch will probably be bit more complicated than a standard game launch, but you would still expect relative parity among PAL regions, and this has prompted speculation in some quarters that we'll be waiting a while for PlayTV too. Here, for example.

This wasn't helped recently by Sony's refusal to clarify reports of a 31st July date and the absence so far of a more detailed estimate than sometime in 2008.

When we spoke to SCEE this week, a spokesperson offered some hope: "We have not yet announced a release date or pricing for PlayTV in the UK, but will have more information shortly," we were told.

That could mean we will see an announcement during next week's PlayStation Day event in London, when SCE president Kaz Hirai and European boss David Reeves will deliver a press conference expected to detail plans for the rest of 2008.

PlayTV, announced last year, allows PS3 owners to record TV programmes on the PS3 hard disk and watch another TV channel at the same time.

Pricing has yet to be announced for the add-on - a USB block in the shape of a sunglasses case - but the most important detail for prospective buyers is whether or not you can record TV while you play games, and Sony is currently trying to achieve this without impacting gameplay.

Check out our PlayTV preview for more on that issue - including comments from Sony's Cambridge studio developers - as well as details on how it's implemented.

Picture of Tom.

About Tom Bramwell

Tom is Operations director of Eurogamer Network and Editor-at-Large of Eurogamer.net. He joined the company in February 2000.

Read more articles from Tom by visiting the Tom Bramwell archive page.

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Comments (30) Latest comment 4 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Ryze #1 4 years ago

    Quelle surprise.

    edit: fixed!
    Edited by 1 at 02/05/08 @ 09:10

  • Milk #2 4 years ago

    that'll be 2009 then . . .

  • Ryze #3 4 years ago

    ...and the issue is (place your bets here):

    Can't record video during gameplay, as this means MPEG-2 traffic on the PS3's already slower-than-ideal databus or whatever, plus data throughput to the HDD that affects streaming games (ie, nearly all of them).

    Oh shit - I'm a genius!

  • Golgo #4 4 years ago

    But what will people do if they want to watch TV in the meantime?!
    Oh...

  • dr_shambles #5 4 years ago

    I personally don't think the delays are all technical.

    Suspect it's really TV companies and licensees bricking it that people can download episodes of say Heroes and copy them to Memory Sticks without any DRM. They'll be nervous about this hitting DVD / Blu-Ray sales.

    Witness the delays for downloadable movies on Xbox Live mainly caused by licensing and it all falls into place.

  • dr.glyndwr #6 4 years ago

    @dr_shambles: Windows Media Centre already does this though, and whilst standalone Freeview PVRs don't you can, if sufficiently keen, usually crack the case, extract the hard disk, and read the files off it. All Freeview broadcasts are DRM-free vanilla MPEG-2 so the PlayTV isn't really anything new in this area.

  • woodnotes #7 4 years ago

    Killzone 2, Infamous and now Sony PlayTV too. What else will be getting the 2009 treatment?

  • dominalien #8 4 years ago

    @Ryze

    Quelle surprise :-P

  • tjlazr #9 4 years ago

    This is pretty annoying as I've been holding off getting a ps3 until this is sorted so I can get the whole PVR blu-ray in a box thing. Still not convinced on the games front by Sony but it will be a bargain media box when this arrives!

  • dr_shambles #10 4 years ago

    @dr.glyndwr

    That's a good point you raise there. My thinking was that Play TV makes this process simpler though, and that's maybe what worries the TV companies.

    Mind you I'm sure Sony in their role as film studio owners and television programme makers might be able to prevent such objections.

  • moggsy #11 4 years ago

    'whilst standalone Freeview PVRs don't'

    The Humax 9200 does allow this - you can connect it to your PC via a USB cable and download programmes.

    'but the most important detail for prospective buyers is whether or not you can record TV while you play games, and Sony is currently trying to achieve this without impacting gameplay.'

    I remember a time when games consoles were all about games. The whole aim was to squeeze every little bit of performance out of the hardware in order to make games better. Now it seems this is no longer the case with the hardware being unstressed enough to work as a PVR while playing a game. Unless, that is, Sony are be overly optimistic about getting such a feature to work.

  • N3dv3d #12 4 years ago

    Now if they did a Freesat version of this, I would definitely be interested....

  • dr.glyndwr #13 4 years ago

    @moggsy: good point on the Humax, I had forgotten about that. That is pretty much directly equivalent to the PlayTV functionality; in fact, it's probably worse from the point of view of a paranoid TV exec. Most people using PlayTV (I'll wager) will transfer to the PSP for offline viewing, whereas once you bounce files off the Humax onto a PC it's trivial to burn them to DVD. Anyway, none of ths is stuff we couldn't do with VHS tapes, albiet at lower quality, so I still think it's a storm in a teacup.

    As for your point about hardware performance, I agree that getting it to record whilst gaming is a tall order which is blatantly why Sony are being so coy about it. The only thing working in their favour is that Freeview PVRs do hardly anything whilst recording as the stream is a nice neat MPEG one anyway. If we assume the stream demuxing is done in the hardware dongle (although this isn't a given) then all the PS3 has to do is receive a bitstream of about 2Gb/hr and stream it to the hard disk. That's not too demanding.

  • moggsy #14 4 years ago

    @ dr.glyndwr

    You are correct, the recording itself shouldn't be too demanding as it's basically just writing data straight to disk. However there will be additional processes required in order to start the recording at the correct time etc. None of this should be too demanding you would think, but games developers have a nasty habit of using every trick in the book to squeeze out performance.

    Sony will have to be really careful that they don't end up with the same situation as their software PS2 backwards compatibility (i.e. not being able to get every PS2 game to run) but with PS3 games!

  • chrisjm #15 4 years ago

    Sony PlayTV delayed? : global warming breathes sigh of relief

  • Marshall2008 #16 4 years ago

    This thing will be pointless unless they add in a scart/svideo or similar adaptor. Why would you want to record from freeview, recording from sky would be much better.

  • Ryze #17 4 years ago

    As far as the 'bit stream straight to disk' part:

    That'd be fine and simple if it wasn't a real-time broadcast video bitstream @4-6Mbps+.

    If the PS3 is maxing out the HDD for game streaming somewhere else on the drive, then where's the video going to go while it waits to be written?

    Sony generally seem shy about putting enough RAM in their systems, so there's nowhere to buffer the video unless they pack the PlayTV with a decent chunk of its own RAM, pushing up the price some more.

  • septimus #18 4 years ago

    Wow, non news. Everyone knows Oz gets things about a year after us usually. Never before, so doubt it is delayed here.

  • Ryze #19 4 years ago

    I'll be very pleasantly surprised if this works flawlessly.

    I'm really looking for more reasons to want a PS3 before 2010.

    Sony keeps removing them.

  • chrisjm #20 4 years ago

    "Why would you want to record from freeview, recording from sky would be much better. "

    why would you use a ps3 to record from sky and not sky+

  • Ryze #21 4 years ago

    Then obviously the guy doesn't know what he's talking about.

    You'd then need a video encoder to recompress the video, and the TV guide would become useless.

    NEXT!

  • rhinoxious #22 4 years ago

    Isn't teh Cell designed to do exactly this kind of thing, dealing with multiple media streams and processing them wihtout hitting upon the main CPU?

    Though having lost 1 SPE to running the OS, and another to poor yields, I guess holding one free for future media applications might not have been an option. Maybe we'll see games that have PlayTV record compatible logos on the back, meaning that they only use 5 SPEs at most.

  • kangarootoo #23 4 years ago

    "This thing will be pointless unless they add in a scart/svideo or similar adaptor"

    /sigh.

    No it won't.

    For those who already have Sky it might be, but there are millions who don't.

  • Arwin #24 4 years ago

    I would think that this hard and software was mostly limited by deals with TV companies. And I strongly wonder what Australia has to do with the U.K. in that regard. PlayTV won't launch in all of Europe at the same time either, so either this article was written by someone really daft, or it's a bit of baiting Sony to come up with some more PlayTV info, like a U.K. release date. ;)

  • nasanu #25 4 years ago

    In australia some of the TV idiots are still saying their program guides are their copyright and refuse to give permission to freely use them. I'd say this is a big issue with play tv here. Should not effect EU.

  • 3william56 #26 4 years ago

    nasanu - not any more - they were forced into allowing EPG a couple of months ago, so all the channels apart from SBS generally carry the full 7 day data.

    However...

    Just to p*ss people with ad skipping PVRs off, the commercial stations routinely bork the timings, making programmes and especially movies start late and overrun. So if you use the handy one press to take the EPG timings for a programme and set the timer, you'll generally end up missing the last 15 minutes of the show. Nice. Some PVRs allow a user to set run in and run out time to automatically allow extra time around scheduled timings (mine doesn't - have to do it manually >:/ ), here's hoping playTV does the same.

    As DVT is compressed already, I'd have assumed that it would be a simple stream from USB to disc in the background - no different than background downloads - but at a much higher data rate for HDTV. Could expect some slowdown of HD game streaming/loading, but shouldn't affect BR games.

    But wasn't PlayTV originally developed by an NZ outfit, you'd presume we'd get it at least at the same time?

  • Vandrius #27 4 years ago

    This will be another key feature the PS3 can sell itself on. I know alot of people who want a HDD recorder, and they are, generally, pricey.

    Parents will be more inclined to get a PS3 for kids when it has extras like this.

  • chrisjm #28 4 years ago

    'I know alot of people who want a HDD recorder, and they are, generally, pricey. '

    no there not. even argos has one for £80.

  • drxym #29 4 years ago

    I wonder why the delay. Maybe H264 is causing them issues or something. Or maybe Sony have decided it will sell better in Q4, perhaps because the PS3 will get a storage bump. I don't see that there would be any licence issues because PVRs already exist that allow you to copy / burn content so where's the issue?

  • Arwin #30 4 years ago

    This article seems to have improved some since I last commented. :p