14 DAY TRIAL // Sony's boss David Reeves has officially announced, as part of the Sony PlayStation Europe event, that PlayTV would be coming in the fall, with an established price tag of 99 Euro. September is the most probable moment for its arrival, but delays might come in as the development process wraps up.
PlayTV is a neat little add-on for the PlayStation 3. It can (and it will) link up to the PlayStation 3 and to the TV you are using. Then, it can record TV shows so that they can be viewed later. It also sports a find-and-record feature that allows you to use keywords so that you can find and then record any and all television programs that touch on the issue.
The most important question regarding the gadget that Sony plans to launch is whether it will allow the user to mark a TV program for recording and then record it while he is using his PlayStation 3 to play a game. It seems the answer is not set in stone at this point.
Mark Bunting, who is a producer at Sony's Cambridge Studio, working on the software for the PlayTV device, has declared a while back that "It's no secret that we want to do it, but we can't jeopardise gameplay. Every game known to man is under test. At the moment, out of all the testing we've done, we haven't found anything go wrong". So it seems more probable that this option will be available.
When coupled with the other functionality of the device and the rather low price tag announced by Sony, this ability might make PlayTV a must have for all gamers that own a PlayStation 3 and have to program their playing hours around episodes of Lost or How I Met your Mother. We'll have to see how it performs when it launches this fall.