Sony pooh-poohs Amazon PS3 PlayTV pre-order posting
E-tailer shows release date, price
Sony has dismissed Amazon’s claimed July release date and price for the PlayStation 3's anticipated PlayTV DVR add-on as “erroneous and speculative”.
The online retailer’s UK website was recently updated to allow customers to pre-order PlayTVs for dispatch on 31 July.
Amazon was even bold enough to offer £10 off the DVR’s claimed £70 (€90/$140) RRP.
But a spokesman for Sony today told Register Hardware that since Sony has yet to name an official release date for PlayTV, the e-tailer’s posting must be incorrect.
He must have been on blower straight to Amazon after talking to us, as the website has since modified its PlayTV page to reflect Sony's official vague timeline.
The electronics giant previously said that it would release the add-on in early 2008, a schedule it hasn’t stuck to.
Amzon UK claims PlayTV will ship from 31 July
Click for full-size image
Whether Amazon’s scheduled release date is a genuine mistake or not remains a mystery. But the published dispatch time would certainly coincide nicely with the 8 August start of the 2008 Beijing Olympics – surely a marketing opportunity too good to miss?
Amazon isn’t the first to pre-empt Sony’s official PlayTV release announcement. In February, HMV blamed a rival retailer for a webpage that claimed the DVR add-on, which HMV was offering for £100 (€120/$200), would be available from 28 March. HMV quickly yanked the page.
At the time, a Sony spokeswoman told Register Hardware that PlayTV was going through quality assurance testing, but that a release date would be announced “fairly soon”.
COMMENTS
@Stephen
Ooops it seems that FTA HDTV is coming to the UK after all, they'll use new technology to squeeze the signal into the available bandwidth (and still sell off the analogue TV spectrum). I missed this news:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/05/ofcom_freeview_hdtv_dtg/
However even the playTV may not work with British HDTV since as well as MPEG4, they plan to use a new (not yet finalised) "DVB-T2" broadcast standard.
Ace..
....it'll do the things i want and i don't care about the fact of playing games as i'll use my other consoles for that, but an HD DVR and a Blu Ray player for £320 (ish) is pretty bloody good value in my book... now if they can just get DTS-MA actually working that'd be spiffing :)
Re:Will it be worth paying for at all?
@Stephen
Where did you read that they have managed to get background recording working? I'd be interested in reading the report.
No FTA HDTV in the UK (apart from a single BBC test channel in the London area), there is no room in the TV area of the radio spectrum for it. Switching off analogue won't help as the government is more interested in selling off the spectrum for a windfall income. As it stands terrestrial HDTV will probably never happen in the UK.
@Andy
Isn't the entire point of a time shifting device to record TV when you're doing something else? "Stop your game and watch the program" is hardly an appropriate solution, especially if you've paid for a pvr.
Re:Will it be worth paying for at all?
I disagree - it won't be worse than useless, it'd still be effective for recording programmes while out or asleep. After all, if you're in and want to watch a programme, you could always stop playing the game for a half-hour.
That said, it would be a handy feature.
As for a text chat client running in the background of games, great....I'll finally be able to see a thousand kiddies exclaiming "1337!" and "pwn3d!" while playing. I really can't wait.
@Jules
The most recent reports I read said the opposite, it seems that final verification that you CAN play while recording TV is what is holding the delivery of the system up.
Also, I'm curious, do you have no free to air digital HD TV in the UK as yet?
Even here in luddite Aus we've had that for years.
