Took delivery this morning of our shiny new Telewest TV Drive. Clearly viewing habits in the Smith household are about to change forever.
We had a very helpful Telewest engineer who gave us a quick 5 min demonstration of all the new features. I’d read a few reports that said the Telewest TV Drive would not be as user friendly as Sky+ – having never used Sky+ I can’t comment on its ease of use – but the Telewest device seems pretty easy to me. And it works! Freezing live TV, etc is all very straightforward – but the ability to record 2 channels simultaneously while watching a third is very cool. A nice big 160GB hard drive should give 80 hours of recording time. And its HD ready. Obviously not much HD content available yet, but the HD picture quality is v. impressive. Roll on the World Cup!
One thing I hadn’t realised is that you can actually transfer content from the hard drive to an external DVD recorder. I’d assumed for copyright reasons, they wouldn’t allow you to do this – in fact I need to look at the back of the device to see what other outputs it has.
I’ll report back further after a few more days of road testing – but first impressions are very good.
The TV revolution has begun.