The president of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, David Reeves, stated that the new PlayStation 3 add-on called PlayTV would be released in Europe between September and December, the first launch taking place in the United Kingdom on September 10.

David Reeves said that "It was very difficult for some of the tech guys but we had to include it in the firmware upgrade, 2.41, but it's done now". It seems that the code needed to enable the new functions for the add-on is already integrated in the firmware of the PlayStation 3, so you could hook up a PlayTV add-on tomorrow if available.

The hardware device could be purchased for 99 Euros on launch. Its principle is pretty simple. You link it to the PlayStation 3 and to the TV and you can then record TV shows and movies that you can store on the hard drive of the PlayStation 3 and which you can watch later. Reeves confirmed that you can indeed record TV programs as you are playing games, something which had not been done previously.

It seems that the device is also coming to other markets soon after Europe, as Kaz Hirai stated earlier in the year that "We've got Australia and New Zealand also lined up for it in January or February, because on their digital terrestrial they haven't actually set the standards yet".

PlayTV will take advantage of the increased storage capacity that Sony announced for the standard version of the PlayStation 3 at E3. Storing TV programs for future watching while gaming will be pretty space consuming but it surely makes Sony's device more media oriented, even if the Xbox 360 from Microsoft gets a partnership with Netflix to stream movies and TV shows directly to the console.