Peter Griffin: TV takes to small screen in big way

One of the unexpected tech trends of the year is the way in which people have taken to watching video on small devices such as the video iPod, Sony PSP and mobile phones.

The smallest thing I find comfortable watching video on used to be my laptop's 12-inch screen, but that's changed since I got a PSP, Sony's handheld gaming device. The high-resolution, wide-screen display does video justice. The video iPod's 2.5-inch screen harder to look at for sustained periods, but it too handles video very well.

When Apple boss Steve Jobs launched the video iPod a few weeks back, it was one of the most low-key debuts the company has run. That's because Jobs has been skeptical all along that people want to watch video on their iPods.

But Apple took just 20 days to reach one million downloads of video files from its online store iTunes.com.

The model seems to be working and now spin-offs of popular shows like Lost and 24 are being developed specifically for mobile phones, another emerging outlet for video.

Now TiVo, the innovative company that introduced the idea of watching recorded TV without being subjected to adverts, is making its boxes compatible with the video iPod and the PSP.

The closest thing we have to TiVo here is the MySky digital recorder available for Sky subscribers. Non-subscribers can buy standalone hard drive recorders but there is no electronic programming guide available to schedule free-to-air programming outside of the Sky camp.

But forget for a moment how far behind the pack we are when it comes to new entertainment technologies and imagine the future: You're too busy to watch Survivor Guatemala so you record it to your hard drive recorder. You know you've got an hour to kill over lunch the next day, so before going to bed, you synchronise your PSP with the recorder and the show is copied across as you sleep.

You'll need a 1GB (gigabyte) memory card in your PSP to store an hour of television content, but the cards are rapidly coming down in price.

Rather than sprawling out on the couch to catch up on the week's recorded programmes, you'll watch them as you take the bus to work, wait at the dentist's clinic or sit on a plane.

Not surprisingly, Apple doesn't appear to be supportive of the move. Why pay US$2 to download an episode of Desperate Housewives through iTunes when you can copy it across from your TiVo box for free? There's a row brewing there. But such moves ultimately make a device like the video iPod much more useful.

Taking around two minutes to transfer for every minute of video, the video transfers are something you'll want to leave running overnight.

TiVo users would pay a one-off free of between US$15 and US$30 for the software upgrade to their box which will convert the video into formats supported by the portable devices such as mpeg4. Thirty minutes of video will consume about 200MB of storage, which in the case of the video iPod is a drop in the ocean.

As for the PSP, Sony expects to have sold 14 million of them by March, and there are bound to be a good number of TiVo viewers buying them.

Against expectations, TV is going portable and the shift in viewing habits has only just begun.