Personal Video Recorders Become Mainstream As VHS Dies

The Quarterly report published by Ofcom about Digital progress showed that millions of us have already switched to hard disk based personal video recorders as VHS is finally laid to rest.

There are currently more than five million subscribers for Sky's Sky+ personal video recorder service up by 8 percent in the first quarter of 2009. Sky has been pushing Sky+ lately, offering it free for all new customers when they join Sky TV, alternatively Sky+HD box will cost punters £49.

2.6 million Freeview PVRs have now been sold with sales surging by 11 percent in the first three months of this year. The number of subscribes using Virgin Media's PVR, called V+, jumped to 611,000 up by 90,400 over the first quarter of 2009. BT Vision, Tiscali TV and Top Up TV made up the remaining 589,000 subscribers.

PVRs also serve another non-negligible purpose, they are used to scrap out television advertising and to keep older, analogue television sets working.

Interestingly, the report by Ofcom does not cover online TV consumption with services such as BBC iPlayer or Five on Demand providing similar functionality as PVRs but without the associate cost. Neither did it cover Freeview by Satellite equivalent, Freesat.

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