Peter Griffin: PIMP lets you do it wherever you like

The working day is done. You head for the bus, but a colleague persuades you to pop across the road for a beer. Four pints later and you and your workmates are slightly drunk. But you're not sloshed enough to have forgotten that it's Wednesday night, that Scrubs and Lost are on, that there's no one at home and that you haven't set the VCR or DVD player or hard drive unit timer to record.

Do you a) follow your workmates to your regular restaurant down the road, resigning yourself to missing your favourite shows, or b) head for the bus stop and home to indulge in your favourite anti-social pastime?

Thankfully, technology is increasingly solving these little dilemmas for us. Across the Tasman, an innovative little company called Ice TV, which makes electronic pro-gramming guides based on the schedules of Australian broadcasters, has developed a system for accessing your digital recorder from a mobile phone. The cheekily-named PIMP (personal interactive media planner) lets you remotely record programmes from your mobile phone, handheld computer or from a web browser. Ice TV sub-scribers need to be running a media centre PC with Microsoft's Windows Media Center software, and the computer has to be constantly connected to the internet.

Ice TV is offering the service as a free add-on to its existing customers, who pay A$3 a week to receive a 7-day electronic programming guide that allows them to schedule TV recordings on their computers. Nothing of the kind is available in New Zealand outside the Sky camp, but with Freeserve launching its free-to-air digital TV service next year, alternative guides will be in hot demand.

A service similar to Ice TV's PIMP will be released this year to work with Australian pay TV operator Foxtel's iQ personal video recorder. Those with iQ decoder boxes are able to use a programming guide on their TV screens to schedule recordings and will be able to do so via mobile or the internet. It's unclear whether the Foxtel decoder needs to be connected to the internet, but it seems likely.

We have a near-identical version of iQ in Sky's My Sky box. So it's likely that the remote recording service will be made available to Sky subscribers in future. The existing My Sky decoders do not have an Ethernet port for internet access, so Sky will either find some other way of programming your recorder remotely, or the service will only be available to those with an as-yet unreleased My Sky box sporting an Ethernet port.

In the US, another innovative company has come up with the Slingbox, the coolest gadget not yet available here.

The Slingbox (US$199) sits on top of your TV and connects to your TV aerial and satellite decoder. It also has an Ethernet connection to the internet. Using a laptop or a handheld palm top device, you can view any TV broadcasts your home TV receives from anywhere in the world. But don't rush out and buy one just yet: PAL standard TVs aren't supported yet.

The Slingbox ushers in so-called place shifting, which allows you to watch TV wherever you want. It's yet another way to squeeze more value out of your tube. Only problem is, what do you do when you're half a world away from your house and the broadband router needs a reset?