Hot wired: Sky's personal video recorder

Given the number of media types invited to the pre-launch of Sky television's MY SKY last week, I have calculated that Hotwired readers will, on average, have seen/read/heard about it 2.58 times already. That's also the number of months to wait before you can replace your Sky digital decoder with this exciting $599 version.

MY SKY is a PVR (Personal Video Recorder), a set-top Sky digital decoder box with its own hard drive for recording our version of TiVo or Sky+ for those who enviously follow such overseas TV technology. Two tuners mean you can watch one Sky channel while recording another and 160 gigabytes of hard disc space mean you can record any programme you want, literally at the press of a button. MY SKY won't be available until Christmas-present buying starts in earnest (December 5), but Sky is talking it up now in case you are thinking about upgrading your DVD disc player to one of the new hard-drive versions.

This launch was so rushed that the sample boxes shown still carried the Foxtel logo and Australian software. The units we get will come from the same manufacturing source with just a few differences in cosmetics and thinking. It's a nice silvery package with very few buttons other than on the large, colourful remote control. And that's what MY SKY is all about - remote control. A rejigged on-screen Sky programming guide will make it push button-easy to highlight and select the programmes you want to record up to a week out.

If you are following a series, another button push will ensure your new MY SKY automatically captures each episode and displays them sequentially for your replay selection. Erasing is similarly straightforward with no need to fuss about a start and finish point. All recording is done at broadcast quality.

The button to get the most wear is the one that pauses a live broadcast. You know how those telephone market researchers always call in the middle of the sports news or a pivotal moment in your favourite show?

With MY SKY you can pause a broadcast exactly as you can a DVD and come back to it when you are ready. MY SKY has an automatic 60-minute buffer so will keep recording the show as it is broadcast even though you haven't asked it to. You can catch up to real time viewing by fast forwarding through the ads.

Something MY SKY won't do automatically is skip ads. Sky spokespeople reckon viewers like ads. It doesn't include a DVD mechanism either, so if you like to watch your own or rented DVDs and make use of your flash 5.1 surround sound system you will need to have a DVD player as well - 160 gigabytes translates to about 60 hours of recording time. Sure as Shane Warne can spin the ball, you will be looking for a way to offload programmes to disc or another hard drive long before the next Ashes series begins.