The popular TiVo in the US is now in the Philippines as Sky Cable formally launched the first personal video recorder (PVR) available here in our country, the DigiBox iRecord. To explain simply, the DigiBox iRecord is mainly used to record cable shows, both live and scheduled, so you can watch them again or at your own leisure.
In Asia, there’s only Singapore’s StarHub and Malaysia’s Astro that offers PVR to their subscribers and being television enthusiasts, Sky Cable doesn’t want us to be left behind in this development.
The DigiBox iRecord has a 320GB capacity that could store about 145-hours of Standard Definition (SD) videos or 86 hours of High Definition (HD) videos. There’s no way at the moment you can choose for a bigger hard drive nor connect an external drive of your own. You can’t even connect it to the PC to store your recorded videos.
You can record two shows at the same time while watching a third one live so you don’t have to fight over the TV anymore. You can also visit a channel’s electronic program guide (EPG) so you can view weekly schedule and select which shows you want recorded and go on with your vacation. Of course, you must not turn off the DigiBox iRecord, just the TV. It’s really useful that way so you don’t need to remember dates and times of particular shows, just pick and record.
Other features include bookmarking within a recorded video, slow-mo and frame-by-frame playback, and folder-making so you segregate the recorded videos among family members.
For existing Sky Cable subscribers, you can get a DigiBox iRecord by depositing a refundable Php4,999 and add Php399 per month for the recording service on top of your monthly cable billing. You will also get 3 months worth of FoxCrime HD, Star Movies HD and NatGeo HD. You can have SkyCable replace your old DigiBox with this new one so you can enjoy HD quality shows on your TV.
It looks really neat especially for TV aficionados out there or those who can’t watch their favorite shows because of their work schedule. You can even bring the DigiBox iRecord with you and connect it to any TVs to watch your recorded content. What I would prefer though is a bigger storage capacity and maybe a smaller form factor.