Thomson SKY+160GB

...PACE this one has a Thomson label. In fact this was one of the reasons I bought it. Thomson are a company who make a lot of military and other rather critical hardware... so their quality control is pretty good.

Sure enough the Thomson box worked falwlessly from day one and has continued to do so.

Like the PACE boxes it has a big cooling fan to keep the electronics happy but It is quieter than the PACE and it runs cooler ...
...happy to say that the Thomson box has solved this. Also having a faster more powerful processor thinsg like digital text and on screen menus appear reasonably fast.

Of course even with 160gb of disk space (some of which sky cunningly remove and reserve for box office films etc...) you will soon fill it up. But as long as you aren't heavily into movies it is perfectly possible to hook the box up to a DVD recorder and burn a via the ... more

Back in the lates 80's, if you can remember that long ago? the world was a simpler place. The internet was still a gleam in Tim Berners-Lee's eye and TV in this country consisted mainly of four chanels which gave you a limited choice of pre-defined viewing.

True the VCR had allowed some of us to begin building up libraries of taped shows that we would occasionally take down from the shelf and watch again when we were driven to it by the deperate realisation that there was nothing on yet again! But on the whole the nation watched TV in the format and at the times dictated by a select bunch of people called network schedulers.

There were of course reasons - for one thing VHS had an awful picture quality... for another tapes were expensive and took up a lot of real estate on the bookshelf... for a third thing sod's law meant that you never had a blank tape when you wanted one and finally of course there was the master stroke whereby the clock timers on the recorders were designed by the same people who gave you the Rottwieler!

But back to schedulers... These demi Gods sat in plush offices on the seventh floor of Television Center and were paid huge salaries to decide what the nation should see (and in what order). When they got it right we stayed in on saturday to watch DrWho... when they got it wrong we went out on a Thursday to avoid Triangle! (for those who unlike me have not worked in Television let me explain that Triangle was a complete Turkey of a soap opera set on a RoRo ferry... it bombed!)

By the 1990's some of us had begun to rebel. New upstarts like BSB (remember them? they were the ones with the squarials!) and SKY had added an additional twenty or more viewing channels and the audience began to fragment. Gone were the days when sports enthusiasts could be coerced into watching a ballet simply because there wasn't any sport on at the time...

Nevertheless we still chose from a set menu and the schedulers actually got a pay rise because now it was even more important to get it right.

But in the early 2000's at last things began to change.

A larger than expected and slightly noisy grey box appeared in our house. This was one the fabled PVR1 SKY+ receivers and with it our familly suddenly acquired the ability to sack all the network schedulers.

In a nutshell, when it worked, this hard disk system allowed you to record a whole series on automatic pilot without ever fighting with a shrink wrapped box of tape again. You could then watch it whenever you wanted and the schedule could be reorganised to suit YOU!

The problem was the first PVR wasn't really very reliable... the disks failed on regular basis. Now I'm an engineer and I had no problem opening the box up and fitting a replacement drive... but when after 18 months i had gone through four hard disks I finally gave in and called SKY, who promptly came and swapped the grey PVR1 box for a smaller white PVR2 box that i still have. Yes I have still had to replace a hard disk but only once which is OK.

In 2004 Sky lanched the third generation of PVR box with a bigger Hard disk. This is the fabled SKY+160 otherwise known as the PVR3. At the time it cost about £150 to upgrade. In contrast to the previous boxes that were made by PACE this one has a Thomson label. In fact this was one of the reasons I bought it. Thomson are a company who make a lot of military and other rather critical hardware... so their quality control is pretty good.

Sure enough the Thomson box worked falwlessly from day one and has continued to do so.

Like the PACE boxes it has a big cooling fan to keep the electronics happy but It is quieter than the PACE and it runs cooler all of which is good when you have it installed in a bedroom.

The picture is excellent as is the surround sound that it outputs via an optical link to any suitably equiped amp.

Besides having all that lovely extra Hard disk space the box sports two USB connectors which did make me wonder if one day SKY will get into DVD burning allowing users to pay a bit extra to burn a full quality DVD direct from the box? So far however there is no sign of this.

The best thing about this was that when I bought the SKY+160 upgrade the nice people at SKY allowed me to move my original PVR2 box into the living room so by paying an extra £10 per month I now have two recording boxes in the house. TV whenever I want in two different rooms.

For those who have never tried a PVR the way it works is this... You call up the onscreen programme schedule. This shows you a week ahead of programmes on all the chanels You then select from the list those programmes which you want to see and you mark them by pressing the R button on the remote.

You can record up to two channels at once. If you tried this on the original boxes they often could not keep up with the data and the result was jerky recordings. I am happy to say that the Thomson box has solved this. Also having a faster more powerful processor thinsg like digital text and on screen menus appear reasonably fast.

Of course even with 160gb of disk space (some of which sky cunningly remove and reserve for box office films etc...) you will soon fill it up. But as long as you aren't heavily into movies it is perfectly possible to hook the box up to a DVD recorder and burn a via the scart socket. That said DVD's are now getting so cheap that it almost reaches the point where one wonders if it is worth doing?

Even so I would never willingly give up the PVR as, after the internet, I think it is one of the better advances in home entertainment. Eventually broadband will allow watch on demand using the internet at which point you wont need a PVR, just PC... but most people it will be maye two or three years before they can begin to get this... Meanwhile PVR is King!

The only thing is, job centers are now going to be knee deep in redundant TV network schedulers! 

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