You can now record 5 TV shows at once. If you live in America.
While PVR consumer technology in South Africa has so far actually been in reverse when it comes to recording functionality, it is in fast fast-forward in America.
In South Africa MultiChoice is the only pay TV platform offering a PVR and PVR capability for subscribers to its DStv service.
The PVR and HD PVR are not bad at all and functionally they're great machines. But, where subscribers could originally record 2 TV shows simultaneously when MultiChoice launched the PVR, neither of the newer models allow for that anymore.
Subscribers who still have the 4-tuner HD PVR can still record 2 TV shows at the same time on one decoder and watch a third TV channel. However, both the 2-tuner Pace HD PVR 2P and the UEC HD PVR 2U can only record one TV show while the subscriber watches another TV channel. There is no longer a single decoder or PVR which can record two TV shows at the same time.
In America DirecTV's new PVR (or DVR which PVR's are called in the United States) can - get this - record 5 HD TV shows at the same time. It has 1 terabyte of storage. The DirecTV Genie DVR can also stream those different shows to multiple TV sets. Now that's PVR progress.
An interesting "complication" (I don't know what the appropriate word would be) is that with the upgrade to HD channels of the M-Net channel, Universal Channel and Studio Universal as well as the HD-only HD M-Net Movies genre channels, HD PVR users are having their PVR's filling up even faster than before.
Because the available space for recordings isn't bigger, and subscribers don't have the option of recording for instance M-Net at anything else than as a HD channel if they're a DStv Premium HD PVR subscriber, one hour long show now takes a much larger chunk of hard drive space on the HD PVR. The result is that less total number of shows can be recorded and stored if you're an avid recorder of shows or movies of these specific HD channels.
